Vegan Apple Banana Mini Muffins

My friend Jenny made these for Liam to have in the morning for breakfast. She joked that she made mini ones to be baby size, but Liam just eats 4 or 5 of them. There still extra cute in mini form, I chose to make mini just to reduce my portion size.

About a week ago I broke down and bought Organic Unbleached Flour instead of my usual Whole Wheat Flour. As much as I LOVE WW Flour, it’s not the best for baking, and I really like to bake. When Jenny gave this recipe to me it wasnt Vegan. The recipe called for 2 eggs, which I substituted for 2 overly ripe bananas, works perfect! Also I switched the regular butter to Earth Balance Vegan Butter. Lastly it calls for chunky Applesauce, but I only had smooth, so I diced up a small apple and threw that in with it.

They turned out amazing! So moist and yummy! Perfect for breakfast and a mid day snack, they don’t need butter or anything. I will be making these often. Jenny freezes them and throws them in the microwave for breakfast, seems like a pretty good idea.

VEGAN APPLE BANANA MINI MUFFINS:

Ingredients

6 Tablespoons Vegan Butter Melted

1.5 Cups Organic Unbleached Flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1 tsp Cinnamon

1/2 tsp Salt

2 Very Ripe Bananas

2/3 C Brown Sugar

1 Cup Organic Unsweetened Applesauce

1 Small Apple

Directions

Preheat oven to 375

Spray mini (or big) muffin pan with PAM

Melt Butter in large bowl

Add Bananas, Applesauce, Diced Apples and mix well

In a separate bowl mix all dry ingredients.

Combine Dry ingredients with Apple mixture, stir well.

Fill muffin tray 3/4 full

Bake for 20 minutes.

These would also be good with some walnuts in them too!

In other fun news I will be ordering a Cherry Pitter and a Food Dehydrator tomorrow! I also got the latest issue of Clean Eating Magazine and it is FULL of amazing summer recipes I need to try, including Roasted Cherries that will be so much easier to make with my cherry pitter.

My food diet has been going amazingly well, I am down 4.5lbs since Monday morning! Crazy! I did however cheat tonight, a good friend of Mr. Gaunt’s is moving tomorrow to Arizona and wanted to take us out to dinner. I picked going to Merels one of our favorite restaurants, because I knew they had some good vegetarian options. I ended up getting a Veggie burger with a fruit cup side, plus a basket of yam chips and guac for the table. I limited myself to only a few chips and just half my burger, plus FOUR giant glasses of water to make me too full to keep eating. Still feeling a little guilty I made sure I went straight to the pool when we got home. Usually I swim 20 laps and then do another 1/2  hour of water aerobics. Tonight I stepped it up and did FORTY LAPS! Wowza! It felt amazing. I have now done 5 consecutive days of lap swimming, go me!

Christmas Soup and Grilled Apple and Cheese!

Two parties down, one to go! I have tons of pics to put up, lots of things have been going on this past week (hence the limited blogging) that I want to share with you. I decided to break up the pictures into a few posts so yah don’t get bored. We are now a week away from Christmas (I know…crazy) and just two weeks left in 2009! My weight loss goal is pretty much NOT going to happen. I mean I’m sooo close, but I just don’t think I’m going to be able to lose 7 pounds in 12 days. I’m kind bummed, but its ok I worked hard and to think that I started this goal with 25 pounds to lose in three months, I’m ok with only losing about 20 of it.

Ok on to the food! YAY! Earlier this week we went to Mr. Gaunt’s mom’s house to help her decorate her tree and have a little family dinner. We really want to start doing a weekly dinner at her house (like on Gilmore Girls…Friday night dinner anyone?) in the new year, we just have to figure what day works best. This week Mr. Gaunt’s mom (we should really give her a nick name…hmm…I think I’m gonna go with Ms. G) so Ms. G recently discovered Clean Eating, one of my favorite food magazines, and decided to make the cover soup. It’s a vegetable soup with Quinoa and Chicken sausage. I tried to find the recipe on their website, but it’s not there. Maybe Ms. G will post it in the comments (wink wink) anyways it was so freaking good! Sometimes vegetable soups are a little bland, but this one was full of flavor, I loved it!

To go with the soup we had the ultimate comfort food Grilled Cheese! Of course we made it healthy with whole wheat bread and fat free cheddar, but the best part was adding thin sliced Macintosh apples into it before grilling! So good and totally changes the flavor. I will never make grilled cheese without apples again. So yeah both of these recipes are in the January/February issue of Clean Eating, go buy it!

And a sneak peek at my tree decorating post tomorrow…