More muffins, with some experimentation!

Hey everyone! Man, this going back to school thing has been a lot more work than I thought it would be... I guess I was really out of rhythm with all this, because the school + family thing doesn't scary me much - I have done it already before.

School talk aside, remember the amazingly delicious Almond Butter Banana Muffins? Well, I really loved that recipe and have been having some fun in the kitchen by experimenting with it, so I came to report a couple of variations I tried.

First, I tried the same recipe but using Peanut Butter, and we found out that the peanut butter really competes with the banana flavors. While we could quite not taste the almond butter on the original recipe, the peanut butter flavor really came through in this variation. I still used bananas and everything the same, but one bite and you could easily tell there was PB in there - as opposed to the muffins made with almond butter that left Matheus and the Husband guessing what the "secret ingredient" was. The final verdict was that the we liked much more and preferred the muffins made with almond butter!

Another experiment I made was transforming the flavor and using Pumpkin in place of the bananas to create Almond Butter Pumpkin Muffins! This ones turned out really good and we all liked it. It was moist and with the same deliciously fluffy texture that the original banana recipe had. Only thing I did was use pumpkin instead of bananas and omit nuts, only adding chocolate chips; also added a bit of water as I thought the wet ingredient mixture was a little too thick, feel free to add a little more water if needed.
We liked these muffins, but in terms of Pumpkin Muffins the Vegan Pumpkin Muffins are still our favorite one. Matheus and I even baked a batch of them today as he wanted these particular pumpkin muffins for breakfast, it really is the best!

Now, back to this recipe that I have been tweaking around, even though we liked and ate all of the muffins, the very favorite of these were the original Heather's Almond Butter Banana Muffins, they were the absolute winner and I am sure will be repeated many times in my kitchen as I just can't get over the awesome flavor and texture these muffins have.
Really, if you want to try some great banana muffins then try this recipe, it is really good!
And here is the pumpkin variation I tried. If you guys try any of these variations let me know, I am curious to see if more people will like these so much as I did!
Enjoy!
Ana










Almond Butter Pumpkin Muffins

1 cup Pumpkin Puree
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup almond butter (I would NOT use PB on this one...)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup oat flour (simply process oats in your blender or food processor until it becomes flour if you don't have this)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour (or whole wheat pastry flour - I am going to try that next time)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt (omit if you use salted nut butter)
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F and line or spray muffin tins.
In a bowl stir together water, pumpkin puree, almond butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla until smooth. Add dry ingredients and mix everything together just until combined. Gently stir in chocolate chips. Pour batter into prepared muffin tins and bake for about 18 minutes.

Yields 10 muffins