I love these muffins – sweet and fluffy, without being loaded with too much sugar – and the gooey, surprise middle makes my kids happy every time 🙂

Great for a lunchbox treat, or even served warm with some cream or icecream, as dessert.

• 225g stewed/tinned pears (drained from their juices)
• 50g olive oil
• 170g milk of choice (unsweetened vanilla almond milk is fabulous here)
• 1 medium overripe banana
• 2 tbsp maple syrup OR honey OR coconut sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla bean paste
• 2 cups spelt flour (Half wholemeal) OR 1 1/2 cups GF flour mix plus 1/4 cup almond/seed meal
• 2.5 tsp GF baking powder
• pinch Himilayan salt
• 100g dark chocolate of choice

Into your blender/processor/nutribullet/thermo cooker place the pear, banana, oil, vanilla, milk and syrup. Blitz until smooth (Speed 7, 10 seconds)

In a separate bowl, whisk together the baking powder, salt and flour (and almond/seed meal if using).

Add the dry mix to the wet and mix to combine (Speed 4, 10 seconds, scrape down and repeat). Don’t over beat. I often just tip the wet mix into the bowl with the flour mix and combine by hand.

Line a standard muffin tin, then spoon fill to about 2/3 capacity.

Place some broken chocolate in the middle of each muffin, then add approximately another heaped teaspoon of muffin mix to the top of the chocolate.

Place in a preheated moderate oven and bake for about 20 minutes or until well risen, golden and they spring back when gently touched.

Transfer to a rack to cool (mostly …. the chocolate surprise is especially good if it still a bit gooey!)

Makes about 14 and they freeze well.

P.S. I have also made these with a white Chocolate filling by Sweet William – so delicious but no longer soy free.

P.P.S These are also really yummy if you replace half of the pear with very ripe strawberries. Mmmmm!!

Enjoy 🙂