Chocolate flaxseed muffins

I’ve had a bag of flaxseed meal hanging around in my fridge for awhile, and the other day, I saw a post by Karen in which she linked to a number of different flax muffins. I decided to make one of the chocolate flax muffin recipes, but when it came time to do so, I didn’t have all of the right ingredients (for instance, we were out of whole eggs, and had no whey protein powder). I guessed and poured, and came up with the following. These are excellent – moist and light, with a very good texture.

1 cup flaxseed meal
1/4 cup Atkins chocolate shake mix
1/4 cup vital wheat gluten
2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa (I used Ghirardelli's - it's not Dutch process)
1/4 cup Splenda (or 2T Splenda and 2T brown Sugar Twin)
1/8 tsp stevia
2 tsp baking powder (double acting)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla powder (or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract)
1/2 cup egg whites
5 Tbsp oil
1 cup unsweetened soy milk

Preheat oven to 350 (my oven runs a little hot, so you might have to go to 375 if yours is accurate). Mix dry ingredients together; sift into wet ingredients. Stir and let rest about 15 minutes. Mixture will thicken considerably. Stir again, briefly but vigourously. Pour into a 12-muffin tin sprayed with non-stick spray (note: do NOT use paper muffin cups). Bake for 25 minutes and cool on a wire rack.

They don’t hold together very well if you do something like try to spread cold cream cheese on them, but I’m not sure that real muffins would, either. I’m not even a muffin person, and I love these. They work out to just over 1.5g net carbs per muffin with all Splenda, and exactly 1.5g net carbs with ½ Splenda and ½ Sugar Twin.

Whole recipe (12 muffins) – calculated in FitDay PC with all Splenda:
1492 calories
115g fat (69% of total)
13g saturated
63g carbs (5% of total)
44g fiber
83g protein (23% of total)

Per 1 muffin/2 muffins:
124 calories/248 calories
10g/19g fat
(1g/2g saturated)
5g/10 carbs
4g/7g fiber
7g/14g protein

I used Designer Whey Protein powder instead of Atkins shake mix. 3 (the little spoons included in the box) spoons of Sweet & Low Brown instead of Brown Sugar Twin. 3 egg whites plus 1 yolk. I also used a little less than 1/4c of heavy cream mixed with enough water to make 1c total instead of soy milk.

I did not have regular muffin tins, so I had to bake them in mini-muffin tins. The recipe made 24 mini-muffins. I baked them for 15 minutes.

With these modifications I got 0.85g carbs per mini-muffin.
They are

I just made a batch of double chocolate walnut flaxseed muffins (slightly different recipe) and ate two before I realized I'd forgotten to put the flaxmeal in! They're doggone good anyway...

lol i did the same thingm then i took then out of the oven and luckily they hadnt really cooked much so i could put the flax in.. i used .5 a cup of splenda and 1tbl spoon of coa coa powder but i found they werent sweet enough..

I made a double batch right before Christmas, and I added about 1/2cup chopped walnuts to 1 batch. OMG

I had also cut up 1 1/2 Hershey's 1g chocolate bar, but the taste wasn't enough to be noticeable in the muffin.

Maybe a different brand of LC chocolate would be good. Anyway, I HIGHLY recommend the walnuts.

Cathy