Healthy Gingerbread Muffins (Clean Eating)

Enjoy this nutrient dense, healthy makeover of a holiday classic. These healthy Gingerbread muffins are high in protein , dairy free (unless you like them served with a little butter, of course) and a brilliant muffin to serve for morning tea or to pack in lunchboxes.

Healthy Gingerbread Muffins

They should really hand out muffin recipes when you leave the hospital after giving birth. Once you have kids, muffins (and smoothies deserve a special mention here too) become a household necessity. Like toilet paper.

You can get kids to eat anything if you make it look like a muffin. Vegetable muffins, Spinach muffins, pumpkin muffins, banana muffins , raspberry muffins .... you get the picture. It's a basic parenting hack that works just as well for toddlers as it does for Teens.

These Gingerbread muffins smell AMAZING!!! Ginger, vanilla and .... a hint of cinnamon. Wish I could share it through the phone screen. 

Icing For Ginger Muffins

Gingerbread muffins and icing go together like....well they go together very nicely, so it seems a shame to make these and not have an icing on hand that can add a little something extra to these without going all out refined sugar hit.

You can either have these as they are (totally delicious), sprinkle a little icing sugar on top (i do this will a small sieve like this one) or make an icing that's Clean and perfectly fine to have occasionally as a little treat. The icing I like to have with these couldn't be simpler. It's more of a frosting than an icing, but the word icing gets the kids more excited than frosting. Whatever works, right?

Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

• Cream cheese (full fat)
• 1 tablespoon of Maple syrup to 6 tablespoon of Cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to 6 tablespoon Cream cheese
• Mix well and refrigerate to thicken before serving

The cinnamon complements the gingerbread muffins and just works!

Making Ahead

If you've got a crowd to feed or are having a party and need a buffet, these muffins are a good shout. I've also made these to be taken into school for Holiday classroom parties, unfrosted and just sprinkled with a tiny bit of icing sugar.

Making them ahead saves a headache on the morning of the party and finding you've not got time to make anything, and that's if you've been lucky enough to have been given a little notice!

You can make these gingerbread muffins up to 3 days before you need them, assuming you'll be eating them on the third day. See below for storage instructions.

Storing

Keep these muffins in an airtight food storage container like this one. These muffins are nice and moist, like sticky gingerbread, so making sure the air doesn't dry them out is important here.

If you're making the cream cheese frosting, you won't be able to out then frosting on until just before you're about to eat them, as being cream cheese with no icing sugar mixed in to harden and set it, it needs to go on at the time you serve them.

Once the frosting on on the muffins, you'll have about an hour to munch them before the frosting starts to lose it's shape!

Ingredients

Spelt flour

Very often in baking since we've been eating Clean, one of the things the kids notice about the baked goodies isn't the flavor change but the color of the finished goods! Refined white flour does give baking a fresh, bright look that can be hard to achieve with wholemeal flour, unless you manage to find white wholemeal.

Since this recipe is Gingerbread and the color should be a gorgeous deep golden brown, I use spelt flour, which only adds to the color. I use a spelt flour like this one, which is becoming more widely available in locals store now.

Maple syrup

Maple syrup is one of my go-to unrefined sugar sweeteners I use in my baking recipes. There's not many recipes I've found where I can't substitute refined sugar for maple syrup and it works especially well in this Gingerbread.

You could use honey, but I'd recommend using maple syrup here.

Spices

The smell the spices used in this recipe fill your house with is unreal. If you could bottle the essence of the Holiday season, this is the smell you want. Got people coming over and want to welcome them into your home? Put a batch of these in the oven, it's absolutely divine!

Make sure your spices are fresh. Check the use by date as they can lose their flavor over time and those little bottles tend to get left, unloved in the back of the cupboard for quite some time. At least they do in this house!

Almond flour

Almond flour, ground almonds, whatever you call this type of flour, it does an awesome job of keeping baking moist. It helps add to the 'stickiness' of this Gingerbread, so always use almond flour here instead of substituting it with regular flour.

Gingerbread Muffins Recipe