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!

Trader Joe's Dried Baby Sweet Pineapple

I have a few items that are considered a staple in my snack cabinet, and Trader Joe's Dried Pineapple is one of them.  I usually grab a handful every morning as a nice and sweet pick me up.  It is the best dried pineapple that I have ever had, because it is nice and sweet but it actually retains the pineapple flavor and does not taste like pure sugar, since it is unsweetened and unsulfured.  Don't let the label "unsweetened," fool you, however, because these are pleasantly sweet.  Each serving is 130 calories and has 20% Daily Value of Fiber!  There are 4 servings per bag, but I usually just grab a handful and the bag lasts me over a week.

I highly recommend this product, as it is tasty and sweet, yet also healthy and not sugary or over-processed.  I should also note that the Trader Joe's near me recently was out of stock of this product for about a month, and I internally started to panic that I would not be able to get my pineapple fix!  Luckily for me, I had about 3 bags on reserve (when I like something, I tend to stock up).  On my recent trip back to Trader Joe's, they had restocked and I snatched up about 6 more bags.  Yes, I recognize that may have been a bit overboard, but they don't expire for a year, so why not?  Regardless, if you are a fan of dried fruit but prefer not to overload on sugar, you should buy this product!