Best healthy carrot apple and banana muffins (simple recipe) (2024)

Carrot, apple and banana muffins are a delicious and healthy snack perfect for lunchboxes and after school. They freeze well too.

Carrot, apple & banana muffins

When I was pregnant with our first I tried to be super organised.

Well as organised as you can be as a brand new parent really not having the faintest clue what’s about to happen to you.

I knew that we would be super busy and not have much time but I didn’t really see how a tiny little person could render me incapable of doing anything other than caring for them for the first few weeks.

He sure showed me!

I make a batch of these every Sunday with my 4 year old daughter.
She loves them! She doesn’t ask for cupcakes or chocolate for a treat anymore, she’s more than happy with one of these muffins. She loves having them in her lunch box at nursery, too. They’re a healthy way to keep her full until dinner time and get some sneaky fruit and veg in there too.
Thanks so much for this recipe!

– Clare

Luckily, I had cooked a few dinner meals to stock the freezer and my wonderful Mum kept us pretty well-fed too.

What I didn’t anticipate though, was how hungry I would be during the day. Breastfeeding seriously worked up an appetite.

Running on pretty little sleep makes you hungry too.

I didn’t want to snack on junk so ate a whole lot of rice crackers and nuts but whenever anyone came to visit and offered to bring something I would always ask for something like banana bread because even the thought of making a loaf myself stressed me out but I wanted it so badly.

My advice to pregnant friends now is to stock the freezer with healthy, easy-to-grab snacks and the second time around I took my own advice.

The only thing about baking delicious, moist, sweet, healthy muffins in advance is that while I knew they were for when the baby came, my brain knew they were there and I was somehow incapable of resisting them.

My big boy was pretty keen on them too so I ended up baking quite a few batches of them.

Can carrot apple and banana muffins be made gluten free?

They definitely can be made gluten-free if you need to. I adapted this recipe from the original recipe which was gluten free.

You can use gluten-free flour or buckwheat flour if you want. Alternatively, it’s not gluten free but you could substitute the flours with spelt flour.

The original also had brown sugar but I think the banana, apple and maple syrup give them enough sweetness.

These were so good! I made them in the food processor and I think they are going to become my go-to muffin base. I had a whole heap of carrots, bananas and an apple to use up –even threw in a zucchini and some pecans and they came out perfectly! (although next time I would probably add more cinnamon, because I like spice) I’ve got a whole bag in the freezer now, all ready for lunch boxes :)

– Sarah

Tip to make prep super fast

To make the prep super-easy, I made mine in the Thermomix (you could also use a food processor).

I just threw in the carrot and apple and chopped it up (I use speed 7 for about 5 seconds for chopping things like this) then added all the wet ingredients, whizzed it, scraped down the sides, added the dry ingredients and gave it another whiz then it was ready.

I’m very big on short-cuts.

Just make sure you don’t over-process them.

Can you use different fruits/vegetables?

Absolutely. I would substitute for similar things though. In place of apple you could use pear and in place of carrot you could use sweet potato.

If you want to use zucchini in the recipe make sure you strain it first to remove the liquid.

Enjoy!

What about you?

Do you make things in advance and end up eating them before you were meant to?

After something a little more decadent? Try our simple carrot cake recipe.

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Carrot, apple and banana muffins

Yield: 12 muffins

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 50 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 free-range eggs
• ¼ cup olive oil
• ⅓ cup mashed very ripe banana (2 small or one large)
• ¼ cup maple syrup or honey
• ¼ cup combination of maple syrup and coconut sugar (or all of one)
• 1 sweet apple, finely grated
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 1 ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ cup full-cream milk (or almond or coconut milk)
• 1 cup (packed) grated carrot (I used 3 regular-sized carrots)
• ⅔ cup rolled oats
• ½ cup almond meal
• 1 cup + 2 Tbsp wholemeal flour

Instructions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 160C(320F) fan-forced and grease or line a 12-hole muffin tin with liners.
2. Whisk the eggs, banana, maple syrup, coconut sugar and olive oil until smooth.
3. Add the milk and whisk it in.
4. Fold through the apple, carrot, oats, almond meal, flour, oats, cinnamon, salt, almond meal and baking soda and mix just until combined.
5. Divide the batter between the 12 muffin holes.
6. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean.
7. Leave them to rest in the tin for 15 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.