Baby Blueberry Muffins

These soft baby blueberry muffins are naturally sweetened with banana and are a freezer friendly healthy snack perfect for little hands! They are egg free and can easily be made dairy free too.

Along with these no added sugar banana pear muffins, I have continued to bake these muffins on a regular basis over the past couple of years and they are always popular!

Jump to:

• Why we love this recipe
• Ingredients Notes and substitutions
• How to make these muffins
• FAQ
• Storage
• More baby led weaning recipes for you
• Baby Blueberry Muffins

Why we love this recipe

• Soft and fluffy muffins.
• Can easily be made vegan – just use a plant based milk instead of cows milk.
• They are sugar free muffins – the banana adds enough sweetness, so no sugar is needed.
• They freeze well – I often take as many as I need out of the freezer in the morning and they defrost by mid morning.

Ingredients Notes and substitutions

• Flour – this recipe uses a combination of plain flour and wholemeal flour. I have made the muffins with all plain flour and they taste delicious 🙂 I would advise against all wholemeal flour as it can make the muffins heavy and dry.
• Oats – I use quick cook oats in this recipe, they are smaller and blend into the batter to give a soft texture suitable for babies.
• Milk – If you ware wanting to make vegan or dairy free muffins, I find soy or almond milk works best.
• Oil – I use olive oil, as it is what I have to hand, and I like the savoury note it gives. Use vegetable, canola or avocado oil if you prefer a flavourless oil.
• Blueberries – Using frozen blueberries in these muffins means they keep their shape, and is a help when blueberries aren’t in season! If you don’t have any frozen ones, placing them in the freezer to cool when you begin this recipe will help, but if you forget, it’s not the end of the world!
• Bananas – not only acts as a replacement for an egg in these eggless blueberry muffins, but as a natural sweetener too. The riper the banana, the more sweet the muffins will be – and they will be more moist with a very ripe banana. I have found bananas speckled with brown spots to be the best as the muffins are still soft but a little more firm than using very ripe bananas:

How to make these muffins

1. Combine plain and wholemeal flour with oats, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon.
2. In another bowl mix the milk with olive oil and mashed bananas.
3. Lightly stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients with the blueberries, taking care not to overmix.
4. Spoon into a mini muffin tin and bake until golden.

FAQ

My recipe tips:

• Preheat your oven and prepare your muffin tin before you start. Once the raising agents (baking powder and bicarbonate of soda) come into contact with the liquid (milk, oil, bananas) they begin to act and produce air bubbles. You want to be able to capture this by putting them in the oven as quickly as possible so the air bubbles get locked in place by the heat, resulting in light muffins.
• Do not overmix your batter. It will make the muffins tough. It is better to have a few small lumps of flour than to overmix!
• Check they are cooked by inserting a toothpick into the muffin. If it comes out clean, they are ready. If not, bake a little longer. NOTE: If you use very ripe bananas – by this I mean very brown skins and very soft bananas – they can look moist on a toothpick. In this case, I would suggest actually placing a blunt knife in a muffin – it will sacrifice one (still perfectly edible!) but this way you can see if you’ve hit a piece of ripe banana, or if the batter still needs to be cooked.
• If you use a very ripe banana the muffins can take a couple of minutes longer to cook than if your banana wasn’t as ripe.
• Cool the muffins in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out, as they are fragile when warm.
• If you use fresh blueberries, check the muffins after 17 minutes.

Storage

• Airtight container at room temperature: 3 days.
• Freeze: freeze for up to 2 months.

More baby led weaning recipes for you

This was originally posted in November 2018, it has since been updated with more information and clearer images to hep you make the best blueberry muffins. The recipe remains the same.