Carrot Muffins

If you were to find yourself at my house on a weekend, I’d likely serve you Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins for breakfast. My kids—all three of them—love these muffins! They ask me to make them every single week. However, after years of eating these muffins each weekend, I think my two older kids are growing a little tired of them. They’re picky eaters, so I wanted to try muffins that were similar enough to the pumpkin variety to seem familiar, but different enough that they wouldn’t seem like the same old muffin.

I came across a recipe for carrot cake muffins that sounded delicious. This gave me the idea to modify my recipe for pumpkin muffins to make Carrot Muffins. Surprisingly, my kids took to them immediately! I don’t generally think of carrots as a breakfast food, but I’ll eat these muffins all day long!

Ingredients

• 2 cups pureed carrot
• 2 cups flour (I use 1 cup whole wheat and 1 cup unbleached white, but you can use all white or all wheat)
• ½ cup white sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• A dash of salt
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil (I use avocado oil)
• 1/3 cup water
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon orange extract
• 1 tablespoon baking powder

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Lightly grease the cups in a muffin tin or line them with cupcake liners.

Place the carrot, flour, white sugar, and brown sugar in a large mixing bowl. Stir together. Add the cinnamon, ginger, salt, oil, water, egg, vanilla extract, and orange extract. Stir together. Add the baking powder; stir until just combined.

Spoon into the muffin cups (each muffin cup will be filled to the brim). Bake for 18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Yield: 12 muffins.

Notes

As I noted above, I’ll eat these muffins all day long. We’ve eaten them for breakfast, of course, but we’ve also had them for snack and as a side with lunch. All three of my kids like these. This is truly significant because my youngest, who is autistic, rarely tries new foods. She likes the pumpkin muffins I mentioned above, so I tossed a couple chocolate chips in hers. This made her carrot muffins similar enough to the pumpkin ones that she gave them a try. Thankfully, she likes the carrot variety!

I’m not interested in having chocolate chips in mine, but I’ve seen a few carrot muffin recipes that call for additions such as raisins, crushed pineapple, pecans, shredded coconut, walnuts, etc. Any of these additions sound delicious to me, and I will give some of them a try in the future.

When I first made these muffins, I made a simple glaze out of powdered sugar, milk, and a dash of cinnamon to put on top of them.

My middle daughter likes them with the glaze, but I prefer mine with a little butter and my oldest daughter likes hers plain. Feel free to jazz yours up with a glaze, but they are quite delicious without one.

What new recipes have you tried recently? Any winners?

Shared at the following:

Encouraging Hearts and Home, Busy Monday, What’s for Dinner? and Weekend Potluck.