Gluten-Free Muffins with lupin, chocolate, toasted hazelnuts and bananas

Lupin is a legume which contains the full range of essential amino acids and therefore it’s a great protein source, especially for vegetarians. You can find lupin “tofu”, milk and lupin flour in Germany, it’s not so common in other places as far as I know, but due to the fact that lupins can be grown in cool climates, which soy can not, it is becoming more common.

I’ve wanted to try lupin for a while now in some form, but I couldn’t actually find any recipes or much information about it online, so I decided to just try it on my own. I found some whole lupin seeds and some ground seeds at my local health store. Those ground up seeds seemed more appealing and I wanted to try them in baking and so I bought them. They were grown locally here in Finland by a farm which specialises in growing protein sources for vegetarians. At first sight they didn’t seem like much; it looked like some sort of grainy flour, but the taste was good when I tried having them just raw, I wanted to know the taste before trying out the baking part.

I have wanted to try out this one recipe I found on a Finnish blog, which I visit regularly; they had a recipe there for muffins with chocolate, toasted hazelnuts and bananas. The taste combination was something I couldn’t stop thinking of and so why not combine those lupin seeds with that recipe. The original recipe contained eggs which I just left out since it had bananas in it, I also wanted to add some muscovado sugar which is a dark sugar with a unique taste, try it if you haven’t already, it’s in irreplaceable especially in chocolate dessert; the taste has a hint of liquorice in it. Try replacing the muscovado with some regular sugar if you don’t have it.

Everything went well with the recipe and I thought that the lupin seed flavor was pretty good. They were denser than what you would get with just wheat flour, but that is to be expected when baking gluten-free. If you want to try this with just wheat try replacing the quinoa flour with all-purpose flour and the lupin with some whole wheat flour. All in all I would recommend at least trying out lupin in some form. I think that I will also try making some “lupin tofu” from it, it never hurts to try out different replacements for tofu.

You can see the original recipe here.

Gluten-free muffins with lupin, chocolate, toasted hazelnuts and bananas

-125 grams margarine

-1 1/2 dl sugar

-1/2 dl muscovado sugar

-1/2 dl plain soy yogurt

-1/2 dl soy milk

-3 dl quinoa flour

- 1/2 dl ground lupins

-2 tsp baking powder

-1/2 tsp baking soda

-1 tsp cinnamon

-2 bananas

-150 g chopped chocolate, I used sweet chocolate, but in the original recipe they used dark chocolate

-80 g toasted and chopped hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 200 Celsius.

Whip the sugar and the margarine together in a bowl, when they are fluffy add the muscovado sugar and whip once again. Mix the flour, the lupin, the cinnamon, the baking powder and baking soda together in a different bowl. Mash the bananas and add them to the margarine and sugar mixture, then add the yogurt, vanilla extract and soy milk to it, then add the dry ingredients. Check the consistency; if it is too dry add some soy milk.

You will need to fold everything together in the end to avoid a rubbery consistency, the secret to making non-rubbery muffins in general is not to over mix and just fold everything together. Spoon the batter into muffin papers and bake until a toothpick comes out clean.

I baked these for 30 minutes, but if you are using all-purpose flour something like 20 minutes will do.

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