These carrot oat mini-muffins are the perfect after-school snack or lunch box addition.

Key ingredients

Whenever I develop muffin recipes, I always try to make sure they include bananas or applesauce. Why? Who doesn’t have a ton of bananas in their freezer? Also, we always have a ton of homemade unsweetened applesauce on hand that we make with apples from our friend’s tree. Applesauce is also a more economical choice and a pantry/freezer ingredient, versus using butter, so I like that too!

Food waste tip: Make your own applesauce from bruised apples

Did you know that you can make your own applesauce? Drop chopped skin-on apples in your slow cooker with 1/2 cup of water. Cook it on low for about 6 hours, puree and freeze!

I also like to use whole wheat flour and oats in my muffin recipes because I know my kids will take them for snack, lunch, or even breakfast sometimes, and I want them to be filling and satiating so the kids aren’t asking for another snack right after they have one.

We always have carrots in the fridge, so it’s an easy ingredient to include.

These Oatmeal Applesauce Muffins with Salted Caramel Chips also contain whole wheat flour, oats and applesauce. A few other muffins on my regular roster are these Chocolate Zucchini Muffins these Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins. Both contain bananas!

Meal prep tip: Shred carrots while you chop carrots for another meal or snack

One of my favorite meal prep tips is to touch ingredients once for all uses. That means, shred the carrots for the muffins and bake them while you chop carrots for your weeknight meals and for lunches. This saves on dishes and time!

Mini-muffins or standard size?

I used to make standard sized muffins for the kids to take to school all the time, but I was always sending them in plastic bags. I have a personal goal to try to send zero-waste/low-waste lunches as much as I can, so these mini-muffins fit perfectly in the containers I have for the kids’ lunch boxes.

Waste-reducing tip: Avoid paper muffin tin liners

You can reduce waste by simply greasing your mini-muffin tins with cooking spray and skipping the paper liner. You can also purchase silicone mini-muffin liners.

If you’d like to make standard sized muffins, simply increase the cooking time by 5 minutes.

Meal prep tips for Carrot Oat Mini-Muffins

If you want to pre-measure your ingredients, then bake them later, use three containers: One for the dry ingredients, one for the liquid ingredients and one for the carrots. You can whip together a batch quickly while your dinner is in the oven, then bake them while you eat. When they’re ready, you clean up once! Plus, your oven will already be pre-heated from cooking dinner.

Warm or cool?

I typically enjoy a warm fresh-baked muffin right out of the oven, but these muffins are a lot more flavorful when you let them cool and allow the flavors to concentrate.