Hummingbird Muffins

After taking a week off of muffin Tuesday, the tradition lived on this week and the chosen muffin was Hummingbird muffins!  I love making these because they have so many different flavors and are very different than the other varieties that I make.  The recipe is adapted from an annies-eats post for Hummingbird Coffee Cake (http://www.annies-eats.com/2012/05/10/hummingbird-coffee-cake/), and I only made a few changes.  I chose to adapt it from a coffee cake into muffins so that I could control how much I actually made since I have no use for an entire coffee cake in my apartment!

Since the original recipe said it makes 16 servings, I quartered it and made 4 muffins.  The only other changes that I made were to use unsweetened applesauce instead of butter to make it a bit healthier, non-fat greek yogurt instead of low fat, and I omitted the glaze and opted to put the chopped pecans in the muffins instead.  Since it is in muffin form and not a cake, the timing in the oven was more experimental because I knew it would not need the 50 minutes that the cake needed, and it ended up taking about 20 minutes.

This is really one of my favorite muffins that I make.  I love the combination of banana, shredded coconut, chopped pecans, fresh pineapple and cinnamon, and even though it may seem like a lot of ingredients, the flavors work great together.  The muffin actually has a sort of buttery taste to it, which is amazing because there is absolutely no butter in them.  This variety is a lot more unique than the classic banana, blueberry or chocolate chip, and it is even more delicious!  When making these, you can choose to follow the original recipe a bit closer and include butter and the glaze, but I honestly don't think that you need to because they are great this way and a lot healthier!