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Healthy, Gluten-Free Pumpkin Spice Muffins

Hi everyone and thank you for the opportunity to guest post on the amazing xgfx site! My name is Carrie and I’m the author of Carrie on Vegan, a blog for healthy, plant-based recipes.

This is me at the pumpkin patch last weekend. Clearly, I love pumpkins:

Before I get to today’s recipe, let me tell you a little about me. I’ve been vegan for just over a year for reasons of animal welfare, health and environmental protection. I am really passionate about using food to prevent and treat chronic disease, so much so that I am pursuing a career change to become a registered dietitian and earning my master’s degree in public health nutrition. For more about me, please click here.

My interest in gluten-free cooking began just this past summer when I developed food allergies and total body hives. Yikes! After about a month of itching I realized I better start avoiding common allergens including gluten. My allergic reaction symptoms immediately improved and my hives have steadily diminished. The more reading I did on gluten and grains in general, the more I learned how common these sensitivities are.

So, I am really at the beginning of a gluten-free diet, but I am looking at the experience as a creative challenge to learn to cook and eat a new way. Life without wheat and other foods I am avoiding is sad in some ways, but in other ways I am simply grateful to have my health back.

When I was deciding on a recipe to develop for this guest post I realized I was craving some muffins to serve along with all of the comforting soups and stews I’ve been making.

As mentioned, I visited my local farm stand last weekend where the pumpkins were rampant!

I love the transition from summer to fall and all of the wonderful squashes:

The recipe I developed is a Healthy, Gluten-Free Pumpkin Spice Muffin. It’s healthy because, like all my recipes, it has no added sugar, salt or fat. In other words, it’s a whole-food recipe.

It’s also very simple to make!

First, you will need to preheat your oven to 350F degrees. Then, combine two cups of garbanzo bean flour, one tablespoon of pumpkin pie spice, 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseeds and ½ cup of raisins in a large bowl. If you like, you can also add ¼ cup of chopped walnuts for extra crunch.

Next, use a high-speed blender to combine 1 cup of unsweetened non-dairy milk (I used soy milk) with 10 pitted Medjool (large-sized) dates. Add ½ cup of unsweetened applesauce, ½ teaspoon of vanilla and ½ cup of pumpkin puree (I used canned).

You’ll get this aromatic mixture:

Stir or whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and divide into a lightly oiled muffin tin:

30-35 minutes later and you’ll have a delicately sweet muffin that has great texture and flavor.

Thanks again for the opportunity to guest post during VeganMoFo, and please come and say hi on my blog. You can also find me on Facebook, or on Twitter.