Vegan Double Chocolate Almond Butter Banana Muffins

This recipe is the result of me desperately trying to fit in as many recipes as I could before heading off to Melbourne to stay with family while my husband works away for a couple of weeks. As many of you know my husband is the one that takes my photos so I can’t really cook anything for the blog unless he is also around to photograph my creations. Needless to say, I was stressing that I wouldn’t have enough content to get me through two weeks of not having him around so I spent the last few weeks cooking as much as I possibly could before we left. I literally whipped these up the day before we left. My poor husband had already packed up all his gear to take on his work trip and I made him unpack it to take muffin photos. I’m glad he did though because this recipe is delicious and definitely worth a full blog write up.

You guys know that I love using nut butter! It’s a great vegan alternative to real butter and a much healthier choice than margarine or other processed vegan butter alternatives. I tend to choose either almond butter or cashew butter if I don’t want my baking to have a strong nut butter taste. Almond and cashew are more neutral tasting than peanut butter or hazelnut butter etc. for this particular recipe, almond works really really well! It gives the best texture and provides a whole lot of extra nutrients like magnesium and vitamin e. Banking said that I think a chocolate banana peanut butter combo also sounds insanely delicious so you can expect to see me whip up something like that soon!

At first, you can really taste the banana in these muffins, but after a few more bites the muffins really start to resemble more of a mud cake taste. They are extra chocolatey and rich and delicious. They are very easy to make, you only need one bowl and also happen to be oil-free. They are low gluten, refined sugar-free, dairy-free and full of chocolate goodness.

I know I’ve promised my gluten-free followers that I would try and experiment more with gluten-free flours in my baking but unfortunately, since I was in such a rush I just used what I was most comfortable with and pulled out my trusty wholemeal spelt flour. It never lets me down. For this recipe, I’m pretty sure a combination of gluten-free oat and buckwheat flour would work really well as well as just a standard gluten-free flour blend so go ahead and do that if you prefer.  I’ve been quite confused about gluten free for quite a while, recently I’ve met a few celiac friends and attended a gut-brain seminar which has made me even more confused. Although I wholeheartedly believe that many people react horribly to gluten and wheat products and should avoid them, it’s also been brought to my attention that many people who are gluten intolerant can eat and digest bread and wheat products from Europe without a problem. Many celiacs can also tolerate sourdough bread and spelt (which is low gluten) with no reaction also. I am now inclined to believe that gluten isn’t the main issue but rather what we do to our guts (eg. too much alcohol, too many antibiotics, NSAID and hormonal birth control) and what we do to our wheat and other grains. I’ve read articles linking gluten intolerance to pesticides used on wheat crops (I think they are glyphosphates but I’m not sure) which are not used in Europe. This seriously makes me even more anxious about chemicals than I already am! As a consequence, even though I have zero issues with gluten and will happily eat it whenever, I’ve made a decision to slowly move towards only eating wholemeal sourdough bread varieties (which break down the gluten and minimize impact of pesticides and chemicals) and use only organic or wheat alternatives in my food like spelt or other grains when I cook at home. It’s not a huge change for us as we mostly do this already but it will take a few little changes here and there which I will move towards slowly and sustainably. My next challenge (when I return home) is to make healthy spelt pizza based from scratch! I need to make a huge batch and freeze them. But I will save that story for another post. In the meantime, you can all enjoy these muffins!