Sweet Maple Oat Muffins

These maple oat muffins are a fantastic bake when you want something that feels hearty, a little sweet but nutritious as well.

I love a good muffin for breakfast, but I’m pretty picky about them. I don’t like overly sweet muffins because it’s cake at that point. Not that I don’t love sweets, I do. I just don’t want a cupcake pretending to be a muffin. Be proud of what you are. These muffins are very lightly sweet on their own, and totally delicious without the crumble topping. If you want them to be sweeter, and more like a pastry for breakfast, add the crumble topping. It adds more brown sugar maple flavor without veering into cake territory.

Muffins are great because they are a quick bread. You don’t need to do much planning ahead other than making sure you have the ingredients. They bake up quickly, and are also very easy to freeze. If you want to freeze these maple oat muffins, let them cool COMPLETELY. Then put them in a freezer ziplock bag (you can use a straw to suck out some of the extra air if you want to be extra) and freeze them in a flat layer. They should keep in the freezer for at least 6 months. You can defrost them all at once, or one at a time!

Whether you love muffins or maple, here are some other recipes you might find delectable if this one is doing something for you: Maple Brown Butter Bundt Cake, Raspberry Buttermilk Muffins, Simple Maple Shortbread Cookies.

Baking Tips & Notes

When you make the crumble topping, you want to make sure your butter has sufficiently cooled before you add the sugars to it. If the butter is too warm it will form a paste instead of a crumble. While it might taste fine, you definitely won’t get the the chunks of sugary goodness on top of the maple oat muffins.

This recipe makes 12 standard size muffins but you can use any size muffin tin. If you are making jumbo bakery style muffins, I’d increase the bake time by probably about 10 minutes. If you are making mini muffins, I’d decrease it by about half.

Maple Oat Muffins Key Ingredients

• Maple Extract – I chose maple extract over maple syrup because this gives you a concentrated punch of maple flavor without any sugar changing the chemistry of the bake. Maple extract is one of my favorite extracts, but make sure you get real maple extract and not maple flavoring. It’s like the difference between imitation vanilla and vanilla extract.
• Rolled Oats – I used rolled oats in this recipe to get the heartiness. I have not tested it with quick oats, but I would venture to guess that swap WOULD change texture and potentially bake time.
• Brown Sugar – Brown sugar and oats are something that just go together. These maple oat muffins only have brown sugar in the muffin to lend the caramel notes and coloring. I almost always use dark brown sugar, but you can use either light or dark.