Spelt Flour Muffins - A New Favourite

If you've been reading my blogs for a while, you'll know that I'm trying to eat more wholesome foods after having a horror year for illness in 2014. Spelt flour is a new ingredient for me, I'd never used it before but I can say that it's rapidly becoming a new favourite. It is much higher in protein than normal wheat flour, has less gluten content and I've been buying it in unbleached wholemeal which adds another healthier element again. Anywhere that I'd usually add flour (for thickening, binding, in pizza bases etc) I've been using spelt.  Even if it's only cutting down the wheat flour by 50% and using spelt flour for the other 50%, I figure it's slightly better in nutritional value than the ol' wheat flour.

This recipe came about from my discovery of Wholesome Foods author Jude Blereau. I have adapted her recipe for vanilla and coconut muffins slightly to the ingredients that I have in my cupboard but otherwise, it's mostly her recipe.

Ingredients:

80g brown sugar
200g wholemeal spelt flour
20-30g chia seeds
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bi-carb soda
45g desiccated coconut
100g unsalted butter
2 eggs
190g milk
2 tsp vanilla powder or extract
Fruit or chocolate (eg, two overripe bananas or a handful of berries or a handful of choc chips)

1 - Mix all dry ingredients together well. Melt the butter.
2 - Add wet ingredients to dry ones and mix well.
3 - Scoop mixture into muffin pans in a muffin tin and cook for 22 minutes at 180 degrees celsius in a fan forced oven (or until a scewer comes out clean.)

The muffins are nutty and really filling. I've actually been cutting more and more of the sugar down and they still taste great. I've gone as low as 50g so far and I'll keep going lower. I simply replace the sugar with some chia, almond meal or sunflowers to the same weight.

I figure that if I'm going to make cake, it might as well be the best quality and have as much nutritional value as possible. It's just a bonus that they taste awesome too.