Secret Garden Muffins – A Healthy Vegetable Muffins for Kids Recipe

Spiced Secret (Vegetable) Garden Muffins . . .

These healthy muffins for kids, A.K.A. “secret garden muffins,” are excellent vegetable hiders. Hence the name. I feed them to my kids for breakfast or put them in their lunches. A little maple syrup for sweetener and lots of spices makes them a treat to eat for adult and toddler. Butternut squash, zucchini, apple, spinach, and coconut makes for a very moist muffin. A very moist muffin makes for great freezing and reheating. Great freezing and reheating makes for a very high functioning muffin, and a happy mom who makes a lot of these muffins for the kids. This is one of our family favorite toddler muffin recipes.

Now, I say these are vegetable muffins for kids, because kids are why I made them. But my husband and I both love to eat these, and many more disappear on the day I bake them than my kids are eating. So they are certainly adult friendly! I just call them kids muffins because, in general, I don’t find too many adults refusing vegetables who can be tricked into eating veggies via muffin.

A note on the vegetables in the vegetable muffins for kids

This toddler muffin recipe creates a many-vegetables-in-one muffin for your toddler. A butternut squash muffin, a zucchini muffin, an apple muffin, a spinach muffin. All in one! The benefit (aside from the ingestion of many vegetables) is that the flavors help balance each other out so that no one vegetable flavor is very dominant.

That said, if your children are particularly picky, I would consider leaving out the raisins and/or the spinach. My kids initially were fine with the raisins but then started complaining about them out of the blue one day, which was super fun. Of course, once one starts, the next one also complains about the raisins. I told them to eat around the raisins, which fortunately they did on that occasion.

Anyway, I mention it because the raisins did create some friction over here which – given all the other vegetables in these muffins – I don’t think was worth it. So I now just leave them out. I’ll put raisins in something the kids really want to eat that is less healthy, because I’m vindictive that way. But I personally like the raisins.

The spinach you cannot taste, but it does leave some flecks of green (see below). So if your kid is really sensitive to little green flecks, you can leave it out. The zucchini peel creates a bit of green, just not as much as the spinach.

A note on the sweetener

Note that they have a bit of maple syrup in them to offset all the vegetables. I chose to use maple syrup because it is healthier for you than straight up sugar. It has a lower glycemic index (i.e., spikes your blood sugar less), contains phenols (antioxidants), and small quantities of other minerals such as manganese, calcium, and potassium. Of course, it is still sugar, so I tried to keep the amount limited.

You could alternatively use honey (also better than table sugar). For me, the added sugar is worth it, given these are vegetable muffins for kids. I have tried making the muffins without much sweetener and they lose a lot of flavor if you reduce the maple syrup by much more than I’ve listed here. No point in making vegetable muffins if toddlers refuse to eat them!

As with other toddler muffins I make, I will make these in the morning. I then feed them to the kids that day. There is always something exciting for the kids about freshly baked muffins. At the end of the evening, I throw them in a baggie and freeze whatever is left. This way, the reheated muffins still taste quite fresh. These particular muffins do great frozen and reheated because there is a lot of moisture from the vegetables.

Currently, we have an entire shelf devoted to muffins in our freezer, with a minimum of three different types of muffin inside at any given time. They make for such an easy breakfast, I like to keep muffins on rotation.

Now, on to the healthy toddler muffin recipe!

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