Healthy Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

Preheat oven to 350 F.

First, mix your flours, salt, baking soda, baking powder and cinnamon in a small mixing bowl. If you don’t have white whole wheat flour, you can substitute all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour. Just keep in mind that using all white flour will lower the nutritional content and plain whole wheat flour will make them a bit denser (not a bad thing in my book but my 3 and 5 year old kids aren’t fans).

Now it’s time to bust out your bigger mixing bowl. Mash up your bananas really well. The riper they are the better. You basically want them almost black and very mushy. This recipe doesn’t have a lot of sugar in it so you really need the natural sweetener that the bananas provide. Add the oil, yogurt, eggs, milk, vanilla and brown sugar and mix to combine. A whisk works great here but a fork is just fine. Just check that you don’t have any big banana lumps hiding in there.

Pour your wet mixture into the dry and gently mix together until it is just barely combined. Fold in the chocolate chips. I like the mini ones so that you get lots of chocolate in each bite. Also it encourages little ones to actually eat the muffin instead of just picking out the chocolate chips. Be careful not to over mix or you will have dense chewy muffins which is decidedly uncool.

Pour batter into your lightly greased standard size muffin pan (recipe makes 12 muffins) and bake for about 25-30 minutes. Every oven is different so keep a close eye on them. You want them lightly browned (when you touch the top of the muffin, you don’t want it to dent in) but do not over-bake or you will have dry muffins (I reiterate…uncool).