Gluten-Free Oatmeal Banana Muffins

Packed with all of the good stuff – bananas, soaked oatmeal, and chunks of ooey gooey chocolate – these Gluten-Free Oatmeal Banana Muffins are the best breakfast (or snack) ever!

In our household, we have this funny little rule about banana baked goods. Specifically banana pancakes.

Thanks to Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes song, Anthony has declared that that banana pancakes can only be made on a Saturday when it’s raining. So what’s a girl to do when her previous rainy Saturday morning’s banana coconut flour pancakes experiment were an awful pile of YUCK (← technically speaking), but she’s majorly craving banana pancakes and it’s snowing (/BLIZZARDING), not raining?

Make Oatmeal Banana Muffins…. because, thankfully, there are no rules about muffins (phew!) and they 110% satisfy the craving.

And is it me or do baking and a blizzards go perfectly together?

A blizzardy day, a hot oven, a hearty bone-and-soul warming muffin, and not a thing to do but chow down. I’m 100% sure that’s what heaven is like.

Ok: heaven is actually just these muffins because, let’s be honest, there will NOT be snow in heaven…. but there WILL be lots of these muffins. Because they are PERFECTION..

I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that they are the muffins to end all muffins. Strong words when my gluten-free raspberry peach muffins and gluten-free pumpkin chai mini muffins are contenders for The Best Muffin Ever, but it’s true!

They are tender, moist, hearty, rich.

AND they almost melt in your mouth.

When have you ever been able to say THAT about a muffin?

My secret to making these muffins incredibly tender? Soaking the oatmeal.

Most oatmeal muffins have a signature chew to them, that often makes them taste a little too “healthy” even when they’re not healthy per se. You know what I mean, right? Not “healthy” in the good way, but healthy in the “yeah, I might be chewing on sawdust” way.

Not these muffins! Soaking the oats in really hot water for a few minutes before adding them into the batter softens the oats and breaks them down a bit, delivering nothing but some extra moisture and pillowy softness to every bite. Seriously, it’s a game [grain?] changer. You’ll never want to make an oatmeal muffin another way!

Oh, and if you weren’t sold already: CHOCOLATE. Big chunks of chocolate. In my little world, banana anything without chocolate is almost a sin.

For these muffins I opted for big chunks of chopped up chocolate instead of chocolate chips. Why? Chunked chocolate seems to melt a little better (I hear that’s because it doesn’t have any stabilizers) AND you can control the size of the chunks of chocolate in your muffins. For me that means: ginormous chunks of chocolate. Go big or go home, right?

I double dog dare you eat a muffin straight out of the oven, in all of it’s oozy chocolatey glory, and stop at just one. Can’t be done. At least not from our research 😉

Thanks to these oatmeal banana muffins, there’s no more waiting on rainy Saturdays for a delicious banana-filled breakfast. Sorry Jack (and Anthony), I think these will even take the cake (errr muffin?) on a rainy day, too.