Healthy Carrot Cake Muffins

Every mother's saving grace is the snack cupboard. It comes to our rescue morning, noon and night. The problem is that the contents of our snack cupboards have taken such a turn for the worse in the last fifty years that now the quick fix that is meant to rescue us from cranky children is having negative effects on their health and well-being. A quote from the documentary Hungry for Change has stayed with me everyday since seeing the film "We are no longer eating food. We are eating food-like products." Open up your cupboard and look at the side of the boxes and bags that reside there. Are the ingredients things you can buy at your local market? If not, why are we feeding our children these foods??

The answer is easy - because they are quick and readily available. But the good news is that making your children healthy snacks does not have to take hours. You can have these muffins in the oven in less than 20 minutes and they are made up of ingredients that most people have in their pantry. If you don't yet have whole wheat flour in your pantry - get it! There's nothing that you can make with white flour that you can't make with wheat flour. White flour has been stripped of its nutrients in an effort to make it more easily digestible. That means that it is processed into blood sugar more quickly and has hardly any nutritional value. Get rid of it and buy whole wheat. It's how nature intended it. 

The added benefit of these muffins is that they contain a vegetable! Woo hoo! Score one for mum. They are lovely fresh from the oven but can also be used the next day for breakfast, after-school snacks and dessert. If you want to be a bit more indulgent you can mix some cream cheese (Philadelphia or Smoret) with maple syrup and drizzle it over the tops of the muffins to really make them carrot-cakey but I think they are perfect on their own. Trust me - they won't stay in that snack cupboard for long! 

Healthy Carrot Cake Muffins

1 1/2 cups (195g) Whole Wheat Flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp salt

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup (176g) honey

1 egg, beaten

1 cup (340g) organic applesauce (apple compote)*

1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 (75g) cup shredded carrots

1/4 cup (27g) chopped walnuts

1/4 cup (40g) raisins

*If you buy organic the only ingredient on the package will be APPLES - imagine that!!

Preheat oven to 180C/350F. In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and salt. In a large bowl combine the oil, honey, egg, apple sauce, vanilla. Gradually whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Stir in the carrots, walnuts and raisins. Spoon or pour the mixture into pre-greased muffin tins or muffin tins lined with paper muffin cups. This recipe makes 10 muffins. If you have a 12 muffin tin then pour a little water in the 2 extra cups to distribute the heat evenly when baking. Bake the muffins 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. 

Voila!