Courgette and Pineapple Breakfast Muffins

This weekend we have been in Sheffield to celebrate Mothering Sunday. The plan was to cook Aída some lovely lunch on the Sunday afternoon, but the day before I thought it couldn't hurt to make a wee something for breakfast too. It is the most important meal of the day after all.

Aída mentioned several times that there was a pineapple that needed using in the fruit basket so I decided to take to Twitter to ask for suggestions on what I could make using said pineapple. I was given some fantastic ideas, all of which I plan to use very soon but the most popular suggestion seemed to be cakes. Everyone loves a good moist pineapple cake after all.

So I thought I could make some really yummy breakfast muffins that would be simple and healthy enough to enjoy as a guilt-free breakfast but sweet and moist enough to still be a nice treat. I had a look in the Morris pantry and there were quite a few suitable ingredients including wholemeal bread flour, BUT the only problem was there wasn't any baking powder to be found in the whole house! I did find a tub of bicarbonate of soda and gave that a go. This still caused a satisfactory rise of the cakes but I think baking powder would have been better so I've put that in the recipe below.

We had the muffins for al fresco breakfast on Mother's Day morn with cinnamon porridge with chopped pineapple in. Lovely stuff!

The muffins turned out gorgeous - sweet and moist with loads of flavour and a great varied texture. Aída was pleased that they were so healthy and said you would never know there was courgette in them... not that I minded people knowing anyway! I will definitely be making these again with baking powder to see if I can get a nicer shape and rise out of them.

Recipe:
85g plain flour
85g wholemeal flour
40g oats
100g granulated sugar
20g Splenda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ginger
2tbsp olive oil
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 courgette
Half a pineapple

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Take a large mixing bowl and add the flours, oats, sugar, Splenda, baking powder, salt, ginger and nutmeg. Stir well.

Take a jug and add the oil, eggs and vanilla. Beat the mixture well.

Grate the courgette and chop the pineapple into small chunks.

Add them to the jug with the wet ingredients.

Add the contents of the jug to the dry ingredients and beat well until all the dry ingredients have been absorbed and the mixture is free of lumps.

Take a muffin tray and line with muffin cases. Add around two heaped desertspoonfuls of the muffin batter to each muffin case.

Place in the oven for around 20 minutes, or until the muffins are risen and golden brown.

Allow to cool on a wire cooling tray. Serve on their own, with porridge or spread with a bit of syrup, honey or cream cheese.