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These cozy gluten free muffins are spiced and lightly sweet, featuring apples, oatmeal, cinnamon and nutmeg. (They’re dairy free, too!)
Here’s a gluten free muffins recipe for all eaters! Because they’re irresistibly delicious. This gluten free oatmeal muffin recipe came about because, confession: Alex and I are not muffin people. To us, muffins are an excuse to eat cake for breakfast. Right?! And it’s not that we’re so un-fun we don’t want to eat cake for breakfast. Maybe if we were 12 again?
But in adulthood, we’ve found that cake for breakfast really messes up how we feel the rest of the day: sugar crash, hungry 30 minutes later, shaky, upset stomach. So we wanted to create a muffin that was nutrient dense and satisfying, but at the same time tastes good. Meet our gluten free oatmeal muffins! Keep reading for the recipe.
Related: 18 Delicious Healthy Snack Recipes | 28-Day Healthy Meal Plan
Gluten free by way of oats!
In very few of Alex and my recipes do we use gluten free flour. Instead, we try to make gluten free items with natural, whole food ingredients like oat flour and almond flour. Using this philosophy does make it difficult in baked goods to come up with a suitable texture. Gluten does go a long way in bringing in a fluffy, beautiful muffin texture. However, the texture of these muffins is a nice compromise. We’ve used oat flour and rolled oats as the base for the muffin. As you can see, they’re a little denser and not as tall as a typical muffin. But these gluten free muffins are moist and beautifully fluffy.
Related: Gluten Free Banana Muffins
How to make gluten free muffins
This gluten free muffins recipe is an update to an older recipe of ours, but totally revamped with the help of our star recipe tester Rochelle. Rochelle loves baking and muffins, which made her the perfect collaborator for making gluten free oatmeal muffins. She kept the concept of our previous muffins, but added a few twists. Here are the secrets to these NEW gluten free oatmeal muffins:
- Oat flour: Instead of all purpose flour, these gluten free muffins feature oat flour that you can make in a food processor! All you do is process normal rolled oats until they are ground into a fine flour. If you don’t have a food processor, you can purchase oat flour at a grocery store or online.
- Coconut oil: Coconut oil keeps the muffins moist and also dairy free. Make sure to follow the instructions about using coconut oil as it can sometimes solidify when mixing with cold ingredients. If you’re not into coconut oil and eat dairy, you could use butter as well.
- Maple syrup: We love using natural sweeteners in our baked goods, and maple syrup brings the right gentle sweetness here.
- Cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice: This blend of spices helps to evoke the feeling of apple cinnamon oatmeal.
- Apples: To bring more moisture and a hint of sweet, mixing in diced apples makes the perfect texture.
Want another apple muffin? Our apple muffins have a crunchy streusel topping that’s to die for (and there’s a vegan variation, too).
This gluten free muffins recipe is…
Vegetarian, gluten free, dairy free and naturally sweet.
Related: Gluten Free Breakfast Ideas for Everyone | Vegan Breakfast Ideas
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Apple Gluten Free Muffins
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 25 minutes
- Total Time: 40 minutes
- Yield: 12 muffins 1x
Description
These cozy gluten free muffins are spiced and lightly sweet, featuring apples, oatmeal, cinnamon and nutmeg. (They’re dairy free, too!)
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups oat flour OR rolled oats processed in a food processor into a flour consistency (see below)
- 1 cup rolled oats
- 1 ½ teaspoons nutmeg
- 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon allspice
- 2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ cup refined coconut oil, melted and cooled (substitute butter if desired)
- 1 cup milk (non dairy milk, for dairy-free), room temperature
- 1 egg, room temperature
- ½ cup maple syrup
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup diced apple (1 medium apple)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F. Grease a 12 cup muffin tin.
- To make the oat flour, place 1 ½ cups rolled oats in a food processor and process until it is very fine. (Note: Do NOT try this with steel cut oats, as they are a very different texture from rolled oats!)
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the oat flour, oats, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, baking powder, and kosher salt.
- Melt and cool the coconut oil. Bring the milk and egg to room temperature (so that the coconut oil does not turn solid when mixing). In another bowl, mix together the milk, egg, maple syrup, and vanilla, then gradually whisk in the coconut oil.
- Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until smooth. Allow to sit for 10 minutes while the oats rehydrate.
- Meanwhile, dice the apple. After 10 minutes, gently fold in the apples to the batter. Then use a ¼ cup measure to spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tin.
- Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until puffed and golden. Store refrigerated for up to 1 week or frozen up to 3 months.
- Category: Muffins
- Method: Baked
- Cuisine: American
Keywords: gluten free, oatmeal, oatmeal flour, muffins, gluten free oatmeal muffins, homemade, easy
Looking for more gluten free recipes?
Many of our gluten free recipes are made with nutrient dense whole foods like oat flour and almond flour. Here are a few of our favorite gluten free recipes:
- Healthy Banana Bread Muffins
- Acai Bowl Recipe
- Chocolate Chip Almond Flour Skillet Cookie
- Amazing Gluten Free Chocolate Cake
- Pistachio Honey Gluten Free Donuts
- Healthy Banana Bread
- The Best Cup of Coffee or Cold Brew Coffee
- Chocolate Tahini Vegan No Bake Cookies
- The Best Toasted Oatmeal
- Lemon Poppy Seed Oatmeal Pancakes
- Vegetarian Spinach Quiche
- Healthy Granola Recipe
- Sweet Potato Hash Browns
- Banana Oatmeal Pancakes
- All gluten free recipes on A Couple Cooks
More muffins recipes
We’ve got lots more where these come from! Here are our favorite muffin recipes:
Awesome! I love how simple these are. Definitely will be making them soon!
These look awesome, but not sure how they are not “cake” maple syrup acts like sugar…..
i’ll definitely try this recipe!
xxxFiC.
These look absolutely lovely! I would love waking up to these!
I’ve been playing with alternative flours a lot lately, and next on my list is oat flour. Will definitely have to try this!
I eat oatmeal almost every day, so it’s nice to find recipes like this where I don’t have to fuss with preparing a bowl of oatmeal. Grab and go is a nice change of pace, and these would be great snacks!
Yes! I actually didn’t think of this being a great “to go” breakfast (since we ate them along with some dinners). Great idea!
Will be trying this recipe! I make an oatmeal bread by grinding oats in my Magic Bullet (love my magic bullet!) and it is very yummy. Great, healthy alternative and oats are so flavorful. Thanks for the muffin recipe!
Gorgeous, gorgeous! I love that you guys are doing a Google Hangout! I’m not sure if I’ll be at my computer on Sat afternoon, but if I’m free, I would love to join. Also, I love cooking with oat flour – it gives baked goods such a nice texture and flavor (and I’m not even GF!)
You are so sweet – thank you! Sorry to miss you, but we’ll have to do another soon. Yes, we are not GF either, but tend to feel better when we have a nice balance of gluten-filled versus gluten-free items, so it’s always fun to experiment for us :) We haven’t done too much with oat flour, but look forward to more in the future!
Sadly every celiac I know also can’t tolerate oats but that just means that there will be more of these for me! Love that shot of the muffins, really gorgeous.
Yes, it is interesting all the levels of gluten tolerance! I think there are some gluten-free oats out there as well? But yes, these are just as delicious for non-gluten free diets! :)
Celiacs can’t eat most oats because they have been cross-contaminated with wheat, but there is actually no gluten naturally in oats. So, a few companies now offer “gluten-free” oats, which, to be more accurate, are actually oats that have been protected from contact with gluten. Quaker is one such company.
ere are gluten free oats (ie. Uncontaminated oats). Quaker brand makes them and a fee other companies.
These look perfect. Such a simple recipe, but very wholesome and healthy. I’ll have to make these for breakfasts this week.
I can`t wait to make these for my dad. He needs a glutenfree diet and gets tired of the same bread. Where I live you can buy glutenfree oats.