Healthier Banana Muffins (A Recipe Makeover)

A couple weeks ago bananas were on sale for $0.10 each, so I bought about 40 of them. I figured whatever we didn’t eat I could freeze for smoothies or baking. Last night I made a large batch of banana muffins to use up some of them up since I’d already filled a gallon sized freezer bag with peeled, very ripe bananas. 

I used Esther Nelson’s recipe from Allrecipes.com for Banana Sour Cream Bread, but since I am calorie-counting (trying to loose that baby weight!), I made several tweaks to make them healthier and removed 40% of the calories!  

You can see that adding almond meal in place of some of the flour did add some calories, but I thought of it as somewhat of a substitute for the walnuts as well. I love using almond meal--almonds are so good for you, and the almond meal makes everything so moist!

The recipe says that it makes 32 servings at 263 calories each. I ended up with around 40 muffins at 125 calories each. 

I wasn’t sure how they would taste because I've noticed that whole wheat baked goods often require more sweetener than those with white flour. In fact, I almost added more sugar at the last minute. But, I held off, thinking I could always find a way to dress them up if they ended up needing it. And I'm glad I did! They're good--not too sweet, but they don’t taste like cardboard either. 


If you want to make them healthier like this but want to offer others who are less health-conscious a way to dress them up, you can serve them with peanut butter or honey to spread on top!