Paleo – Primal Blueberry Muffins with Dark or White Chocolate

First of all,  let me say that since moving across to a primal way of eating, I’ve spent hours upon hours looking for recipes and then testing them to come up with the best blueberry muffins I could to be a suitable replacement for the the family’s love of Starbucks muffins.

It wasn’t easy. Many of my favourite recipe sites used coconut flour, which gave a grainy texture and a dryness that was OK, but not an all around winner.

In the end, for a nice moist muffin I’ve settled on the following recipe, to which takes only 5 minutes to throw together. You can additionally add 30g of white or dark chocolate for a more decadent treat. The white chocolate versions are the favourite in this house.

Ingredients

60ml extra virgin olive oil

60ml runny honey

2 eggs

75g frozen blueberries

196g ground almonds

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

Optional – 30g of chopped white or dark reduced sugar chocolate. I use either Green and Black’s white cooking chocolate or Green and Black’s Dark Cooks Chocolate.

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 180C.

2. Put the oil, honey, eggs and frozen blueberries into a blender and blend until the mixture is almost smooth. I like to leave a couple of berries whole so you get the occasional a surprise juicy explosion.

3. Mix the almonds, baking soda and salt together in a bowl. Don’t chuck them into the blender as the almonds will become very oily.

4. Add the blueberry mixture to the almonds and stir well until it’s thoroughly mixed. It’s important to have a good root around the bottom of the bowl to make sure there aren’t any pockets of unmixed batter. You’ll end up with a lovely purple mixture with the consistency of Yorkshire pudding batter.

5. (Optional) Add in your chocolate and stir again.

6. Spoon the mixture evenly into 6 papers cases in a muffin tin.

7. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes. Test the muffins with a skewer to see if they are cooked through. If they are, the skewer will come out clean.

8. Take out of the muffin pan and leave to cool.

Nutritional information (approximately)

Serving Size 1 muffin

Calories 337

Calories from Fat 241

Total Fat 26.74g

Saturated Fat 2.992g

Polyunsaturated Fat 5.061g

Monounsaturated Fat 17.39g

Sodium 323mg

Potassium 270mg

Total Carbohydrate 19.83g

Dietary Fiber 4.1g

Sugars 14.49g

Protein 8.96g