Whole Wheat Apple Coffee Cake Muffins

These absolutely beautiful muffins may look like we have veered off our eat-healthy-January plan, which is really more of a we-stuffed-ourselves-silly-in-December consequence, but looks can be deceiving.

It's cold outside and when it's cold outside, muffins make it onto the winter necessities list. So I made these muffin goodies with whole wheat flour, added a whole apple, and cut back the sugar. Now I give you Whole Wheat Apple Coffee Cake Muffins that are fluffy and sweet and are two parts healthy to one part cakey. 

So, these particular muffins won't contribute to a junk food problem, but they may bring up problems of their own. For example, do you have any muffin bottom haters at your house? Every time I make muffins like these, muffins with crunchy, sweet, coffee cake toppings, my kids come down with a serious case of muffin-bottom-itis.

Everybody loves the fluffy muffin top with its crunchy streusel, but the sad muffin bottoms are tossed aside, destined to become stale and crumbly under the kitchen table. It's a problem we're trying to work through here. Muffin-bottom neglect, it's a real thing.

All that aside, these Coffee Cake Muffins are worth the trouble.

I had some very sweet, very delicious honey crisp apples to work with so I really cut back the sugar in this recipe. Also, I don't really like my muffins very sweet, so you may want to adjust the sweetness to your own tastes. Enjoy (the tops and the bottoms)!

Yield: 12 muffins

Whole Wheat Apple Coffee Cake Muffins

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Prep Time 10 minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes

Total Time 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup sugar (or maple syrup)
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons melted coconut oil or butter
• 1 medium apple, peeled and chopped

For the Streusel

• ½ cup dark brown sugar
• ½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a 12 cup standard muffin tin and set aside.
2. Prepare the streusel. Combine all of the ingredients in a small bowl and mix well.
3. To prepare the muffins, sift together all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine all of the wet ingredients. Combine the wet and dry ingredients, mixing only until just combined. Gently fold in half of the streusel and the chopped apple.
4. Fill the muffin cups of the prepared tin ⅔ full and sprinkle each muffin with streusel topping. Bake for approximately 15 minutes, or until muffins are golden and the tops spring back when touched.