Recipe: Vegan Purple Sweet Potato Muffins
By Shannie McCabe
All southern gardeners love sweet potato for its incredible heat tolerance and scrumptious flavor. At the Johnny Appleseed Organic Village, we appreciate the sweet potato both for its nutritional and horticultural benefits.
From a regenerative farming perspective, it is a perfect plant to create lots of organic matter. The long vines and dense foliage of sweet potatoes make them a quick and effective ground cover to cool the soil and block out encroachment from weeds. Many sustainably minded farmers and gardeners in the deep south will fill their summer gardens with sweet potato as a heat loving cover crop, maintaining soil health even in the hottest part of summer when very few plants can survive.
Each summer, we marvel at the quick growing nature of the sweet potato vine, and by fall we have an abundance of deeply nutritious tubers. Sweet potatoes are high in fiber and rich in a host of vitamins. The most familiar sweet potatoes are bright orange colored; however there is a rich diversity of colors when it comes to sweet potatoes, from yellow to bright purple and lavender.
The Molokai Purple sweet potato is a fantastic, antioxidant-rich root crop. It's a Hawaiian variety that’s as tasty as it is nutritionally beneficial. The deep purple flesh is super high in anthocyanin. This cancer-fighting compound is responsible for the blue and purple pigment in fruits and veggies like blueberries. Anthocyanin has been shown to aid in healthy aging, to prevent and fight certain cancers and to protect against cardiovascular disease. Anthocyanin-rich foods are lauded for their ability to help prevent age-related mental decline and to enhance the memory.
Our purple sweet potatoes have been a favorite culinary focus, from Mikael’s vegan purple sweet potato latkes, to the muffins that I baked with my extra harvest. These vegan purple sweet potato muffins are tasty and nutritious, and they make a perfect morning snack or dessert and can be frozen for later!
Ingredients
1 ¾ C. All purpose flour or gluten free flour mix
½ C. Coconut Sugar
2 tsp. Baking Powder
1 tsp. Cinnamon
1 tsp. Cardamom
¼ tsp. Salt
⅓ C. Coconut Oil (plus a little more for oiling muffin tin)
½ C. Nut Milk like Coconut Milk or Almond Milk
¼ C. Maple Syrup
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
1 C. Purple Sweet Potato Purple
Walnuts or Pecans (optional)
Instructions
Chop peel and boil purple sweet potato until soft, puree in a blender and set aside.
Preheat oven to 375 F. Oil a muffin tin with coconut oil.
Sift together dry ingredients in a medium sized bowl.
Melt coconut oil and place in a large bowl, add milk, vanilla extract and sweet potato puree, blend or whisk together.
Add dry ingredients into the large bowl of wet ingredients, mix until incorporated.
Fold nuts into the batter.
Pour batter into greased muffin pan and bake at 375 F. for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the muffins comes out clean.
Pull muffins out of the oven and cool on a wire rack.
Conclusion
We hope you love this delicious, nutritious vegan treat as much as we did! Until next time, happy gardening!
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