Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Vegan Oatmeal Carrot Cake Muffins

It's that time of year, carrots, pumpkins, squash, everything orange. Orange is my favorite color, and it's not a far stretch to say that a lot of my favorite foods are orange, including the ones listed above. I've been having a craving for carrot cake, but I don't want all the fat of cake or cupcakes, so I decided to make a bread and muffin recipe that I could eat for breakfast, or top with an icing to eat as dessert at night. I took a recipe that I found on the Quaker Oats website, and made slight modifications so that it would be low fat and vegan. The icing I will say is not vegan, and it's not really low fat, I did use 1/3 less fat cream cheese, but I'm not kidding anyone, it's still fattening. The original recipe for the bread is located here the recipe below is how I modified it to be vegan and lowfat.

Vegan Oatmeal Carrot Cake Muffins
1 cup oats (quick or old fashioned, uncooked)
1/2 almond milk
1 (8-ounce) can crushed pineapple in juice, undrained

1 tbs ground flax seeds mixed with 3 tbs water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp all spice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 1/2 cups shredded carrots (about 3 medium)

Icing:
4-ounces regular or reduced-fat cream cheese, softened
2 teaspoons firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Omit to keep muffins vegan.

Heat oven to 375°F. Lightly spray bottom only of 12 muffin tins with cooking spray or grease lightly.

For muffins: Combine oats and milk in medium bowl; mix well. Let stand 10 minutes. Add pineapple (including juice), flax seed mixture and vanilla; mix well.

In large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well. Stir in carrots.

Add oat mixture to dry ingredients all at once; stir just until dry ingredients are moistened. (Do not overmix.) Fill muffin tins to the top.

Bake 20 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean and crust is golden brown. Cool in pan on wire rack 10 minutes. Remove from pan. Cool completely. Store tightly wrapped.

For Cream Cheese Spread: Beat together all ingredients in small bowl until smooth. Store tightly covered in refrigerator up to 3 days.

Rating = So Go Damn Good

PS. You can most definitely add 1/2 raisins or walnuts to the mix - I just didn't have any on hand so I omitted them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Delicious! I left out the flax seed mixture and added the whole 15-16 oz can of crushed pinaepple, and an extra 1/2 cup of oats or so. It turned out so good. More than 12 muffins for sure. I would just add a little more cinammon, allspice and nutmeg because the blandness of the oats and flour could take on a little more spice. But all muffins were gone in less than two days, so that's how good they were. Thank you!

JB said...

So glad that you liked them! JB