Chocolate Banana GAPS Muffins with Coconut Flour

Chocolate and ripe bananas flavor coconut flour muffins sweetened with a bit of honey for a delicious accompaniment to breakfast or an afternoon snack. These Chocolate Banana GAPS muffins are a bit indulgent yet also nourishing.

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What do you do with a banana that has gone brown? As in, a banana that is too brown to easily peel and eat, and that also is very sweet? There are options…

• slice them up and freeze them for smoothies later
• slice them and roast or sauté with butter and a little cinnamon for a sweet yet unsweetened dessert
• mash them up and make banana bread or banana muffins

The first two can still work on the GAPS diet, or if you are avoiding gluten, grains, refined sugars and flours, etc. Banana bread and muffins are a little harder. However, GAPS muffins are possible!

If you are following the GAPS diet, you may not have added chocolate to your diet. You could make these without the chocolate, or you could skip this recipe until you have successfully added chocolate into your diet. These muffins don’t contain a lot of chocolate, so that makes them a little easier to tolerate.

Sometimes I use almond flour to make muffins, but this recipe relies on coconut flour. If you have an almond allergy, coconut flour can be a good choice. There is a bit of coconut flavor to these muffins, in spite of all the other flavors included. If you can’t stand any coconut flavor, these might not be the muffins you are looking for.

Coconut flour, in case you are new to its use, behaves quite differently from other flours, including gluten free flour blends, any sort of wheat flour, and nut flours. You need to use much less, and it will absorb a lot more liquid than other flours. That is to say, it doesn’t interchange well with other types of flour in recipes. The closest flour to coconut would be a zucchini or squash flour, but I have not tried that in this recipe.

If you aren’t on GAPS, commercial coconut flour will work fine. If you are on GAPS you will want to make the coconut flour yourself. Here is more information about how and why to make your own fresh coconut flour.

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Benefits of Using Coconut Flour

There is no perfect flour! Different flours present different tradeoffs. Different people need different things at different times, and no one flour ideally meets every need. Almond flour is often compared with coconut flour, both being readily available, gluten free, grain free, low carbohydrate flours with health benefits (and allowed in some measure on the GAPS diet). I use both at times. You will need to assess your own needs and act accordingly. Some benefits to coconut flour include:

• it is gluten free
• it is grain free
• it is nut free (good for people with nut allergy)
• it contains MCTs, which are good for our metabolism and more
• its fat content does not include high PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids), unlike nut flours
• it does not need to be soaked like almond flour does (especially on GAPS)
• it is low in carbohydrates, and so has less effect on our blood sugar
• it contains manganese
• its fiber can help us in some ways, though the fiber also may be a concern to people on GAPS
• it contains some protein
• it has a very low oxalate content, unlike almond flour

How to Make Chocolate Banana GAPS Muffins

Mash up your bananas. I usually use a potato masher, but you can also put them in a food processor or blender to accomplish this. Make them as smooth or chunky as you prefer. You can see mine are on the chunky side.

Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

If you are using a chocolate bar, chop it and add to the batter.

Portion the batter into 12 muffin cups, lined with muffin papers if you like. Bake 20-25 minutes at 350 F.

Take the muffins out of the oven and either remove to a rack or tip the muffins a bit so the bottoms don’t get damp.

Make Chocolate Banana Muffins Your Way

1. Leave out the cinnamon or substitute another spice.
2. No yogurt? Use another liquid and add 1 T lemon juice or apple cider vinegar. This is an acid to help your baking soda activate.
3. Leave out the chocolate chips, and/or add some chopped nuts.

I hope you enjoy these muffins! Let me know what you added in, if anything!

Looking for more chocolate recipes? Don’t miss my Easy Chocolate Cinnamon Bread!