I have a friend that opened up a Paleo bakery here in town and she’s KILLING it!  Her stuff is so awesome.  Her name is Elizabeth and here’s her website!  Her amazing granola is like crack and ANYONE who tries it will tell you how addictive it is.  So although I’ve been doing gluten free for some time, she’s inspired me to go completely grain free where I can.  The thing I love is that in paleo baking when you use grain free flours, you are replacing grains/carbs with fiber and protein.  I feel really good about sending my kid to school with a muffin that is packed with protein and fiber instead of carbs and sugar!  So I started researching some paleo muffin recipes because Ritter LOVES a muffin (he especially loves Elizabeth’s muffins).  So I was determined to create a paleo muffin he would like as a snack.  I compared lots of recipes and this is what I came up with.  I made 3 or 4 batches, trying to perfect it as I went.  I think they are pretty awesome.

In this recipe…notice that we use unsweetened applesauce and unsweetened coconut. So no added sugars.  We have natural sugar from the apple and the tiny amount of honey or agave that we add.  I also use veggie glycerin to sweeten in this recipe.  If you’re not familiar with this product you should be.  Read up here.  It’s a liquid sweetener like honey but doesn’t register in the body like a sugar and doesn’t cause a spike in blood sugar levels.  It’s a safe sweetener for diabetics and people who try to avoid sugar.  You can find it at whole foods, walmart, drugstores, or you can order online.  Here’s the one I use in this recipe.

In this recipe I use a mix of 2T agave and 2T glycerin to sweeten.  I like the balance of the flavors I get and I don’t feel bad about the small amount of sugar in 2 tablespoons of agave being divided into 12 muffins.  If you want to use ALL glycerin instead of adding in the agave, you certainly can.  Glycerin adds slightly more moisture than agave so the muffins will be slightly more moist – you could increase your almond flour by maybe 2 T to balance this effect and help them hold together.  Don’t increase the coconut flour though.  We also use stevia powder in this recipe.  I love stevia as a natural sugar free sweetener but you can’t go crazy with it in baked goods because it dries them out.  You can use any stevia you like but I prefer NuNaturals brand.  You could also use Splenda or Truvia here.  Your choice.

 

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 cup almond flour

1/3 cup coconut flour

2 T ground flax seeds

2 T Nunaturals stevia powder (or any brand you like)

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1.5 cups unsweetened applesauce

2 T honey or agave

2 T vegetable glycerin

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 c shredded unsweetened coconut

2/3 cup chopped walnuts (or any nut you like)

1 tsp cinnamon

1 gala apple peeled and finely chopped

Directions: 

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix eggs, applesauce, agave, glycerin, and vanilla. Mix well with whisk.
3. Add walnuts and shredded coconut to egg mixture.  Mix and set aside.
4. In another bowl mix flours, salt, cinnamon, baking soda, flax, and stevia. Whisk well.
5. Combine wet and dry and mix well with a large spoon.
6. Fold in apples and mix well.
7. Drop by spoonfuls into a large muffin pan that has been sprayed with non-stick spray or lined with paper muffin cups.
8. Bake for 30 minutes or until brown and toothpick comes out clean.
9. Allow to cool completely!  This is super important.  If not cooled, the muffins will stick to the pan and will be crumbly.  Allowing them to cool helps them bind and release from the pan!  TRUST ME!

**My recipe was adapted from this one here.