Ginger Carrot Breakfast Muffins

My inspiration this week is clean out my kitchen!!!  As part of the last two weeks' worth of funk, I realized that my kitchen is so stocked, that I might not have to go food shopping to for meals for the entire week.  So for breakfast this week, I have decided I need to make these Ginger Carrot Muffins I found while figuring out a way to use up the carrots I have in my fridge.  

As part of a discussion with a friend around New Year's, my hubby and I decided we need to break out the juicer and start juicing more often. Or really, I asked hubby to bring home some juice when I was sick with a stomach bug and he brought home this:

Yeah, that's a 25 pound bag of carrots under there. I'm still staring down half of this bag, and I'm starting to get creative in my carrot consumption here before I start turning orange.  I love ginger and carrots, so this recipe was a no brainer for me.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 cup oat flour*
3/4 cup honey 
1/2 cup milled flax*
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup minced crystallized ginger
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
2 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk - or in my case 1 cup milk with 1 tablespoon white vinegar to sour the milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
2 cups grated carrots

*Most people probably don't have this all on hand, but I'm weird.   To make the oat flour and to grate the carrots, make your life easy and use a food processor.  Do this separately! I use ground flax in my smoothies to give me extra fiber, and get it at any natural foods store.  Keep it in the freezer, as it's highly perishable.  Also, if you don't want to use honey, switch it out in equal portions for vegan cane sugar like the original recipe shows, but I have an unholy obsession with honey and try to use it in my baking whenever possible.
I'm not kidding about the obsession - here is the current honey survey of my pantry. Well minus the Queen LaBeeva brand that I just used up.

Recipe:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 12-cup muffin pan.  If you only have a six muffin pan like me, use that and prepare to do part of this recipe twice.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients, including the minced crystallized ginger.

In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, buttermilk, honey and oil, and stir into the dry ingredients. Fold in the carrots. It does not look pretty at this stage, but just trust me on this one.

Spoon the batter into the muffin cups, filling them almost full. Allow the muffins to rest for 10 minutes before baking.

Bake the muffins for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one comes out clean. If you don't have a toothpicks, try using a piece of dry spaghetti.  It works!

Remove the muffins from the oven, and cool in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

These are so good.  One was sacrificed for testing purposes, but started out as a crumb test and somehow disappeared.  :)  I'll be having them for breakfast this week - split and topped with peanut butter and  Citrus Marmalade.