Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary

Recipes, travel & adventure from the wild and remote Shetland Islands

Morning Glory Muffins

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Morning Glory Muffins - packed full of carrots, apples, dates and scented with cinnamon. Freeze leftovers for later!

Morning Glory Muffins – packed full of carrots, apples, dates and scented with cinnamon. Freeze leftovers for later!

A cinnamon scented breakfast muffin recipe packed full of carrots, apples and dates.

Morning Glory Muffins

It’s become a bit of a yearly tradition now, with my birthday being at the start of December, for my Canadian grandmother to send me a cookery book and a pair of earrings as a combined birthday Christmas gift. With overseas post being as slow as it is, this eagerly awaited parcel usually arrives in late January. That poor fella who has to swim across the Atlantic with it, I feel for him!

Over the years I’ve amassed a wonderful collection of Cape Breton recipe cookery books – you know those fundraiser cookery books compiled by community groups and organizations? The ones with the tried and tested family recipes in them?

I absolutely love them, and they each have a little message handwritten on the inside page in my grandmothers beautiful cursive handwriting – the kind of handwriting only retired primary school teachers have.

Last years cookery book was the Inverness Cottage Workshop’s Favourite Recipes: Volume 1, compiled by the Inverness Cottage Workshop. The Inverness Cottage Workshop provides vocational, personal, and social skills training for adults with intellectual disabilities, and they also support off-site employment and community involvement opportunities. It sounds like a rather fantastic organization.

Morning Glory Muffins

One recipe particularly struck my eye while flicking through the book. Morning Glory Muffins from Cindy O’Neill, the executive director of the Inverness Cottage Workshop. This breakfast muffin with scented with cinnamon and packed with grated carrots, apples and, most interestingly, chopped dates. Carrot muffins of this sort usually have sultanas in them, and I was interested to try the recipe with the dates.

While preparing the recipe (which involved a bit of washing dirty carrots from my organic veg box delivery!) I realised that the recipe was incomplete. She’d mentioned baking soda and salt in the instructions and forgotten to list them in the ingredients list, so I went to the internet to see if I could find it there. There are umpteen zillion online versions of this recipe, so I can’t exactly credit the source of recipe development, but I did manage to fill in the blanks with the missing ingredients. And yes, this recipe is usually made with sultanas.

The dates, however, totally work. A fantastic adaptation. This breakfast muffin is deliciously moist and not too sweet despite the sugar and dates. I really like the texture the dates add, and my daughter and eldest son loved them too, requesting them in their school lunchboxes. My youngest wasn’t that keen – he knew there were vegetables in it.

Morning Glory Muffins

As an aside – when I was preparing to immigrate back across the pond to Scotland back in 1999 (170 years after my maternal MacIntosh family set sail for Nova Scotia from Skye), my mother’s words of advice were to stick with visiting places with the same names as those I knew from Cape Breton.

This summer I will be stopping in the Scottish Inverness while on my epic 250 mile mountain bike cycle from Shetland to Fort William to climb Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain. A food blogger there has kindly offered my traveling companion and I beds and a shower, which I am sure will be well received after cycling through the highlands!

But I ramble. This recipe, it’s lovely. It’s not the prettiest recipe in the world to photograph, but these muffins more than make up for it in taste.

Morning Glory Muffins
Morning Glory Muffins
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Packed full of fibre and flavour these muffins are a delicious way to start the day.
Morning Glory Muffins
Print Recipe
Packed full of fibre and flavour these muffins are a delicious way to start the day.
Servings Prep Time Cook Time Passive Time
24muffins 15minutes 35minutes 10minutes
Servings Prep Time
24muffins 15minutes
Cook Time Passive Time
35minutes 10minutes
Ingredients
Servings: muffins
Units:
Ingredients
Servings: muffins
Units:
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 F/180 C/ 160 C fan and line 2 x 12 hole muffin tins with paper cases.
  2. In a large bowl mix together the sugar, flour, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda and salt.
  3. Add the coconut and the nuts.
  4. In another bowl, mix the eggs with the sunflower oil and the vanilla.
  5. Add the dates, grated carrots and grated apple to the egg mixture and stir well to combine.
  6. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry, stirring well to just combine.
  7. Spoon into the prepared baking cases and bake for 35 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
  8. Cool the muffins in the trays for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
Recipe Notes

This recipe freezes well. Defrost for an hour before eating, or pop a frozen muffin into a lunchbox for a lunch time treat.

Click here for the nutritional information for this recipe.

OTHER BREAKFAST MUFFINS YOU MIGHT LIKE
Banana Weetabix Blueberry Muffins from Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary
Rachel Allen Rhubarb Breakfast Muffins from Maison Cupcake
Oaty Cinnamon & Raisin Muffins from The Lovely Appetite
Pear & Pistachio Muffins from The Hedgecombers
Wholemeal Breakfast Muffins from Supper in the Suburbs
Marmalade Breakfast Muffins by Thinly Spread
Banana Bran Muffins by Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary
Spinach & Tomato Corn Muffins by Eats Amazing
Coconut, Blueberry & Banana Muffins by From Plate to Pen
Bucks Fizz Breakfast Muffins by Foodie Quine

LINKING UP WITH SOME BLOGGING CHALLENGES
Inheritance Recipes from Coffee & Vanilla and Pebble Soup

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Comments

  4. Thank you so much for joining #inheritancerecipes. I am pinning these muffin to my secret board too and will be making them this weekend for my Canadian friends who are arriving on Monday

    Reply

  9. These look so healthy and tasty. Dates are one of my weird foods. I always hate the thought of them but know that they add a beautiful moistness and taste when used in Baking

    Reply

  10. Yum! These look so good. I need to try these muffins out. I also love your eye for photography, whenever I try to take photos of food it never works out as good in practice (actually that is all photographs, not just ones of food ha ha!).

    Reply

  11. I’ve never made Morning Glory Muffins but I have heard of them – yours look so good I want to try them soon. Your upcoming adventure sounds exciting! Good luck with all the planning & hope it all goes well!

    Reply

  14. These sounds very much like a carrot cake recipe I have! I am going to try this though to get a comparison. Thanks for sharing x

    Reply

  30. Your muffins look moist and have wonderful texture. The cinnamon I am sure shines through.

    Reply

  36. I am in love with the photography on your blog. Dates are a favorite ingredient of mine. I love the mixture of dates and carrots in this recipe. I was surprised to see shredded coconut in the recipe. I never would have guessed that. A great mixture of flavors and so healthy. I think my whole family will love this!

    Reply

  37. I love the name of these muffins, especially since I’m rarely in my glory in the morning. hee hee Thanks for sharing this recipe, plus the corrections to it.

    Reply

  42. I love muffins but especially ones that offer nutritional value and not just empty calories. These look perfect!

    Reply

  43. I love the backstory of these muffins! I have so many of those types of cookbooks – I think they’re a fun look at real cooks lives) These muffins look absolutely delicious! Just the thing I want on a weekend morning!

    Reply

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