these grain free muffins have a delicious chai flavour, packed with cinnamon and apples, and they are simply perfect.

Apples are probably my favourite fruit ever, any type of way. I love eating them raw, I love eating them baked, with or without skin, you name it. I love all types of apples too, I don’t think there’s one apple I’ve met that I don’t like! That being said, I always have apples in my fridge– and I tend to always have a stash of baked apples too, because I eat soft-baked, cinnamon-y apples in my SCD yogurt almost every day. It’s those baked apples that inspired this recipe, since I had a very large batch of baked apples and I wanted to do something with them. Thus, grain free apple chai muffins were born.

If you don’t always have baked apples on hand like me, don’t worry, but you will need to bake a few for this recipe. I used approximately 1 cup and 1/4 cup of baked, peeled apples in this recipe, which were already cut up into chunks but I diced them even smaller before I added them into the batter.

Apart from the baked apples, which fill the muffins with bursts of apple flavour, these muffins are made out of a base of coconut flour and dry curd cottage cheese. I really love coconut flour for muffins, I find they offer a much better consistency than using almond flour, which I tend to relegate to cookie and bread/bagel recipes. Where almond flour muffins can be quite dense, cake-y and almost hard to swallow, coconut flour creates something a bit lighter, fluffier and more moist. These muffins have dry curd cottage cheese mixed in, which adds to the oomph– you’ll see these muffin tops don’t sink in after they come out of oven! They stay extra fluffy on top, making them look picture perfect like any old fashioned gluten-full muffin! Crazy, but it’s true. You can have your muffins and eat it too while being grain free.

If you don’t have dry curd cottage cheese, you can definitely try subbing in thick, dripped SCD yogurt– I haven’t tried it myself but typically this substitution will work. I plan to try it in the near future so I will update this recipe post after I do and let you all know the result.

I hope you love this recipe, I recommend eating these bad boys warm with a bit of butter in the middle, but you can definitely eat them cold out of the fridge, freezer, or room temperature and you will still enjoy them.

apple chai muffins: ingredients

3/4 cup of coconut flour
1/3 cup of dry curd cottage cheese
1/4 cup of coconut oil, melted
1/3 cup of honey
5 eggs
1 tsp of baking soda
1/2 tsp of pure vanilla extract
1 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp of ground ginger
1/4 tsp of ground cardamom
1/8 tsp of ground allspice
1 cup + 1/4 cup of already-baked (and peeled) apple chunks (i measured these already-baked because i had them on hand, but if you don’t already have baked apples on hand, just peel and cut up at least 4-5 apples into chunks and bake them at 350 for 30-40 mins before you make these muffins! you may not need all the baked apples for this recipe but it doesn’t hurt to have!!)

apple chai muffins: how to

using a food processor, add the coconut flour, baking soda, and dry curd cottage cheese and blend until well-combined.
mix in the spices– cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and allspice and blend again. once well mixed (you may need to scrape the sides of the food processor in the process), add in your wet ingredients except for the baked apples, which you will mix in by hand at the end.
once the wet ingredients are mixed in well, remove the blade from the processor and mix in the apple pieces until well mixed. i saved one piece of baked apple for the topping, to make these look pretty, but that is optional.
ppour batter into a parchment cups prepared in a muffin tray. it will make approx 10 muffins. bake in a preheated oven at 350 for 15 minutes, and remove from oven, and add a piece of baked apple to the top of each muffin. return to oven and bake for 15 more minutes (30 minutes total in oven).
remove from oven and allow to cool. store in fridge for the week, or freezer.

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