Carrot muffins

This easy recipe for carrot muffins makes moist muffins flavoured with warm spices that are perfect for breakfast or a snack. You can add chopped nuts like walnuts to this recipe, top them with cinnamon sugar or even a crumble topping if you prefer!

What you need to make these

Carrot muffins are simple to make, as simple as the ingredients. All you need to make these is:

• Flour, all-purpose is ideal, or you can try a mixture of whole wheat and all-purpose, but this will affect the texture a little.
• Sugar, granulated sugar or light brown sugar
• Leavening agents, specifically both chemical leaveners (baking powder and baking soda)
• Salt, fine kosher salt like Diamond Crystal is what I use. If you use a different salt that has more or less sodium per gram, you will likely have to adjust the quantities so the muffins aren't overly salty or under-salted
• Spices, otherwise your carrot muffins may taste bland
• Butter, either salted or unsalted will work, though if your salted butter has a lot of salt in it, you may have to adjust the salt in the recipe
• Eggs
• Sour cream, preferably full-fat (14 % fat) otherwise the muffins may be dry.
• Vanilla extract to enhance the sweetness and the flavour of the muffins
• Shredded carrot (I grate carrots on the finer side of a box grater)

Spices to add to this recipe

Carrots are sweet and pair nicely with warm, fall spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves.

Another option that would work well here is ground cardamom (from the seeds of green cardamom pods).

Inclusions

You can keep the muffins plain, or you can jazz them up with some inclusions:

• chopped nuts, like chopped toasted walnuts or pecans
• dried fruit, like golden raisins, chopped dried apricots, or even chopped pitted dates
• chocolate, specifically white chocolate chips would be great in carrot muffins

When making carrot muffins, you may want to add ingredients like canned pineapple to the mix, just beware that this will throw off the baking ratio in the recipe, which may lead to prolonged bake times or a gummy or wet crumb.

If you decide to go that route, make sure to drain the chopped pineapple well and even dry it on paper towel to remove as much moisture as possible before stirring it into the muffin batter.

Easy method for muffins

Lately, I've been using the reverse creaming mixing method to make muffins. I find it easier and you don't need a mixer for it. For this method, you:

• put all the dry ingredients in a bowl, so the flour, spices, chemical leaveners, salt, and even the sugar, then whisk them together.
• The butter is cubed and softened, worked into the dry mixer by hand until the mixture resembles coarse sand.
• add in the wet ingredients and stir everything together to form a thick batter.

For carrot muffins, you fold in the shredded carrot and nuts (if using) at the end of this process.

Pans and muffin liners

I baked these muffins in two 6-cup muffin pans. You can also use one 12-cup pan if you have it! Makes it faster and easier to get all the muffins in and out of the oven at once.

For this recipe, regular paper liners work great (same as for cupcakes), or you can also opt to use silicone liners. I don't recommend parchment liners because the muffins won't stick to the parchment liners, which will fall right off.

If you would prefer to bake without any liners, I recommend using cooking spray to grease the wells of your muffin pans.

Other muffins to try

Muffins are a quick and easy treat that you can bake. They freeze well and they are easy to grab for a snack when you are on the go. Here are a few other muffin recipes to try: