Carrot Cake Flourless Blender Muffins

I've been craving carrot cake.  I've especially been craving the kind with a big old layer of cream cheese frosting up on top.  Around Easter, I found plenty of carrot cake and carrot cake cupcake recipes on line and they looked amazing.  I decided to go for a healthier carrot cake muffin and basically added grated carrot and some other ingredients to the flourless blender muffins I've been making for months.   

The base of the muffins is always oats, eggs, bananas, applesauce, honey, Greek yogurt, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.  I've made a number of different varieties by adding in ingredients such as zucchini, coconut, nuts, coconut, chocolate chips, and so on.  Ordinarily the recipe makes 12 muffins, but since I add over 1 1/2 cups of extra ingredients in this recipe, it's better to make 14 or 15 muffins out of this recipe.  I made 12 muffins this time around and the muffins took much longer to bake and it was difficult to tell when they were done.  The other thing I noticed about these muffins is that, when the muffins first come out of the oven, it's hard to get the paper liners off of the muffins cleanly.  The next day, however, the paper liners come off much more easily.  Foil muffin liners may work a bit better and of course you can avoid this problem all together by not using muffin liners at all (just make sure you have a good non-stick surface and you use non-stick spray in your muffin pans).

Carrot Cake Flourless Blender Muffins

Yield: 12 muffins

Ingredients

2 cups old fashioned oats (use certified gluten free oats if desired)

2 ripe bananas

2 eggs

1/4 cup Greek yogurt or light sour cream

1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

3 Tbsps honey

1 1/2 tsp baking powder 

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/8 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/3 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

1/3 cup raisins

2 finely grated carrots, small to medium size (about 1 cup)

Optional:  additional chopped nuts to sprinkle on muffins before baking

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  In your blender, pulse together all ingredients except for the chopped nuts, raisins, and grated carrots. Pause to stir if ingredients do not blend well at first.  Blend until well combined.  Pour contents of blender into a large bowl.  Add in chopped nuts, raisins, and carrots; gently fold in ingredients until well incorporated. 

2. Pour batter into muffin pans lined with paper cups. Makes 14 - 15 muffins.  If desired, sprinkle additional chopped nuts on top of the muffins.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until the tops are puffed and golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.