The origin of this recipe is an old 1980’s school cookbook which I’ve modified it over time to be egg, dairy and sugar free – I’ve also added some wholemeal flour along with frozen berries. We make this recipe at least once a week and I’ll often get a nudge from Mr Incredible if we’re low on stock – it’s not a problem if we are though – they take less than 10 minutes to whip up (if you use egg instead of chia then they are even faster)!

It’s easy enough to revert the recipe back to having dairy and egg – just replace the oil with melted butter and the chia and water mix with an egg. Making it with chia and oil though has the added bonus that they’re always on hand if I run out of eggs or butter.

Ingredients

• 3 very ripe large bananas (or 4 normal sized ones)
• 1 tbs Chia seeds
• 3 tbs water
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1 cup of plain flour (alternatively 1 1/2 plain flour and no wholemeal)
• ½ cup plain wholemeal flour
• 1 tsp baking soada (bi-carb soda)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• Frozen berries to taste (I use about 1 -2 cups) – if you scrimp on the berries though you won’t have enough batter for 12 muffins.

* if I’m making these for our family half of the recipe is usually topped up with some chopped chocolate / choc chips. This of course means that the rest of the muffins are no longer sugar free or dairy free, but Mr Incredible LOVES chocolate muffins!

Method

1. Heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (fan forced oven)
2. Place chia seeds and water in a small container and leave sit for 5 minutes until they become gelatinous
3. While the chia seeds are soaking, squeeze the bananas in their skins to start the mashing process, remove bananas from their skins and place them in a medium sized bowl. Continue to mash with a fork in the bowl
4. Add oil and mix (this is the melted butter replacement)
5. Add chia seeds and mix (these are the egg replacement)
6. Add flours, baking powder and baking soda. Mix with a wooden spoon until mostly combined.
7. Add frozen berries and finish mixing until all ingredients are combined
8. * at this point you can either add the chocolate or not – or, as we do, dispense half the batter and then add the chocolate.
9. Spoon batter into muffin trays (I use liners in the trays)
10. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes (depending upon your oven you may need to get them out after 12).

Enjoy!

These will keep in the fridge for a week, although may become crumbly towards the end of their life due to the lack of sugar.