Surprisingly Succulent Vanilla Keto Muffins

These little gems just might be the softest, most succulent keto muffins you’ve ever tasted! They’re perfect for any celebration — like Mother’s Day, which is just around the corner! — or you can grab one when you just need a little something extra to satisfy your (sugar-free) sweet tooth. And, of course, you only need 5 ingredients to make them!

This week’s post comes a bit early, in case you’re already thinking about your Mother’s Day celebrations. And you might want time to make a couple batches, since there’s so much you can do with the muffin dough, as you’ll see at the end of this post: it’s incredibly versatile!

Tips for making the muffins

This recipe is really easy to make, but you’ll need to take two important things into account to ensure a perfect result: you’ll need to measure the ingredients precisely, and to make sure the dough is fluffy enough. So, when the recipe calls for 6 tablespoons of coconut flour, I’m not kidding: you really do need to take a 1 tablespoon measurement and measure out 6 level tablespoons. You can read about how I came up with that amount later on in this post, but for now, just trust me that it’s best to follow the recipe to a T!

Oh yes, and please use silicone (mini) muffin cups or a silicone muffin pan for these rich, buttery muffins. They are almost like little fat bombs, and if you use paper liners, the grease will end up in the paper liner (and will also sink to the bottom). But when you use silicone muffin cups, you’ll get a beautiful result with an even texture.

I also recommend making mini muffins rather than large ones. Why? First of all, these muffins work best as bite-sized treats. Second, if you use large muffin cups, your muffins might become too browned on top while remaining raw inside. Mini muffins, however, bake evenly all over.

Powdered erythritol helps achieve the softest texture. Erythritol crystals (or granulated erythritol) tend to make the texture — and especially the surface — hard.

If the mixture separates after you add the eggs, don’t despair! Just add the coconut flour and continue beating the heck out of the mixture. After a couple of minutes, you’ll have a velvety dough with an even consistency. But don’t stop now: even after you reach this consistency it’s a good idea to continue beating for a few minutes. You’ll really want to incorporate as much air as possible into the dough to achieve the fluffiest muffins.

By the way, the muffins taste great fresh, but they’re even better the next day. Just store them in an air-tight container, either in the fridge or at room temperature.

Other than that, these treats are very simple to make, so let’s take a look at how to prepare them:

Combine the butter…

…and the powdered erythritol, preferably in a deep and narrow bowl. (My hand mixer’s beaters broke, which is why I’m using my stand mixer here. Otherwise I’ve have preferred to use a hand mixer.)

Beat until very fluffy. This takes about 10 minutes. (10 minutes… Actually, maybe it’s a good idea to use that stand mixer after all: that way you can do something else while the machine is running. But I often watch YouTube while using my hand mixer to fend off boredom, so it’s doable!)

Like this.

Add the eggs, one at a time…

…beating well after each addition so that you’ll get a smooth and very fluffy result. Don’t despair if the mixture separates after you add the second egg. It will recover after you add the coconut flour. But naturally, you should avoid letting the mixture separate if at all possible! So, this is the goal:

Add the coconut flour…

…and beat until smooth and fluffy, about 5 minutes.

Add the vanilla extract. Beat until well combined.

Spoon the dough into 16-20 silicone mini muffin cups or into a silicone mini muffin pan.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until golden and the centers have risen a bit.

Remove from the oven.

Let cool completely before removing the muffins carefully from the silicone molds. It’s important to let them cool properly for easy removal!

After cooling, remove the muffins from the cups or the pan.

Nice!

Decorate if you wish.

Yum! (As you see, I LOVE this vanilla frosting!)

 

My succulent keto muffin experiments

This recipe was never meant to be a muffin recipe. It actually started out as a filling recipe! Some years ago, I was developing a recipe for 5-ingredient Swedish Mazarins, and at some point I realized that the filling would actually make wonderfully succulent muffins. The mazarins are small pastries with a filling that usually has almond flour and butter in it. I created a low-carb version of these, and once I made a batch of them and found I had some leftover filling. So I decided to bake the extra filling in small muffin cups to see what would happen.

To my huge surprise, the result was amazing! The extra filling made really soft, moist muffins. In fact, they were slightly too greasy, but they had so much potential that I thought it was definitely worth doing some further experiments in hopes of creating a super-luscious muffin recipe.

So I conducted some experiments, adjusting the amounts of ingredients. Somehow the result was always a bit too greasy. Moreover, I was using a lot of almond flour. I thought that switching to coconut flour might help. (Plus, it’d be more cost-effective: in low-carb baking you can replace the required amount of almond flour with just 1/4 as much coconut flour, and coconut flour is much cheaper anyway.)

So, after some careful calculations I was ready to conduct my first experiment using coconut flour instead of almond flour. It was around Valentine’s Day of this year and I thought I’d serve some really delicious muffins to my family on Valentine’s Day.

Well, the result wasn’t that good. The interior of the muffins was moist and succulent, yes, but the surface was hard. I realized that I had accidentally used too much powdered erythritol — I was supposed to use 1/3 cup (80 ml) and now I realized that I had used 1/2 cup (120 ml). No wonder the surface was hard! That’s what too much erythritol does. And naturally, the muffins were too sweet. There went my Valentine’s Day muffins…

Last week, I took the recipe and continued to ponder it. I had lots of ideas for improvement, but first of all, I wanted to figure out exactly how much coconut flour to use. I thought I’d used too much of it in my first experiment — in addition to too much erythritol.

So, I reduced the amount of coconut flour dramatically, from 1/3 cup (80 ml) to 3 tablespoons. Well, now the muffins were definitely on the greasy side!

For my next experiment, I increased the amount of butter, as the mixture tended to separate after I had added two eggs. And now, I used 5 tablespoons of coconut flour (it’s an exact science here, you know!) This time, the muffins turned out better, and were better again on the following day. But they were still a bit on the greasy side. I decided to keep experimenting to see if I could improve the result even more.

So, for my next experiment, I decided to increase the amount of coconut flour and used a whopping 1/2 cup (120 ml). Needless to say, the muffins turned out too dry, and I could really taste the coconut flour. Not nice!

Okay. So, something between 5 tablespoons and 1/2 cup (120 ml) coconut flour sounded like just the right amount. I conducted one more experiment with 6 tablespoons of coconut flour. Eureka! Now the texture was soft and rich but not too greasy. And the muffins were really easy to release from the mini muffin forms! Pretty much perfect!

Still, I wanted to try the recipe with almond flour one more time. I used (for the first time!) super-fine almond flour from Bob’s Red Mill. I think the result would have been okayish, but when I was about to add the second egg — which I wanted to add after the flour this time, in order to prevent the dough from separating — my hand mixer fell on the floor and the beaters bent so badly that I couldn’t use them anymore! I have to order new beaters and that will take time. At least I still have my reliable stand mixer I can use before my new beaters arrive.

Anyway, no big loss: I had the perfected the recipe with coconut flour, and it was exactly as I had hoped. I wasn’t bothered about the almond flour: for this recipe, coconut flour is just far more affordable, and makes these muffins so much better.

Here’s the recipe:

 


 

Nutrition Information	In Total	Per serving if 16 servings in total
Protein	23.5 g	1.5 g
Fat	109.1 g	6.8 g
Net carbs	7.3 g	0.5 g
kcal	1115 kcal	70 kcal

 

Tips for variation

You can naturally add other flavorings than vanilla. For example, grated lemon peel or orange peel provides a bright burst of citrus.

I love to play with different frostings and decorations, too. For Mother’s Day, I prepared these cute little cupcakes with pink buttercream roses using this muffin recipe and this vanilla frosting that uses natural colors (made from beetroot).

I also baked the dough in mini bundt cake pans and glazed them with this lemon glaze.

And that’s not all! Look at these cute cake pops that I made. You can still dip them in homemade sugar-free white chocolate and decorate with some tiny sugar-free marzipan flowers, they will make a stunning centerpiece for your Mother’s Day coffee table!