Blueberry muffins: dairy free, egg free, refined sugar free

Muffins are such an easy bake - you assemble your wet and dry ingredients and mix the two together. Pop in the oven and you're done. The muffin recipes I historically used contain butter, buttermilk, and eggs - three things that are obviously off our list.  Today I still managed to make Apple and cinammon, Banana and sultana and blueberry muffins that are all allergy friendly. I also made M and his colleagues entirely un-allergy friendly double chocolate.

A couple of months back I scoffed at the need for recipes to be free of refined sugar. The further I progress in our weaning journey, the less I want Harry to have and become accustomed to sugar in any form. However, especially now he's up and about maintaining his weight is crucial and also giving him access to new tastes and textures. Also, I don't want him to be the child at parties found face down in a bowl of Haribo because he never has anything sweet (only slightly exaggerated story of a Brownie I once knew).

Maple syrup is one of my favourite sweeteners, I love the flavour it has - this recipe was borne out of a remembrance of a Nigella blueberry and maple syrup sauce for pancakes. We've got all the books packed away at the moment as M is building me shelves (happy squeal - I'm such a booklover, this is the equivalent of shoe cupboards for other women) so I didn't bother to look that up, just went with those flavours. I'd been sent some Maple syrup from We love maple so made good use of that.

The weather today was disgusting, Harry has a streaming cold, Mark is putting up my much wanted shelves and I declared today a pyjama day and decided to hit the kitchen and do some baking.

Blueberry muffin recipe
Makes 12 small muffins or 6 big ones

¼ cup maple syrup - or honey if you're not vegan/ don't have any maple syrup

¼ cup Pure or other dairy free spread

1 egg -  or ¼ cup of stewed apples/ or 1 mashed banana

1 cup plain flour – ideally I’d have used half and half wholemeal and white flour, but had run out of wholemeal

¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp baking powder

¼ cup stewed, unsweetened apples this replaces the buttermilk that you would traditionally use
1/3 cup blueberries

Preheat the oven to 170 C

Put cake cakes in a 12 hole fairy cake tin

Beat together the maple syrup and dairy free spread – this won’t go light and fluffy, but will end up looking curdled. That’s fine.

Add the stewed apples, and the egg/ stewed apples/ banana and beat again

Beat in the flour, baking powder and bicarb – at this stage you want a dropping consistency – if it seems a bit runny just add a couple more  tablespoons of flour

Thanks to We love Maple for the Maple syrup - I wasn't compensated in any other way for this post, nor was I required to write it.