blueberry sunshine muffins

I love sunshine...people who know me well actually use as an adjective to describe me...there's always room for sunshine in a recipe. These little cuties are just in time for summer!

The boyfriend and I both work very early in the morning (like 4 am) at least 3 times a week and I've been wanting to come up with something easy to eat in the car and nutritious for us to start our day with, I did a lot of muffin research before I started these because a plain blueberry muffin would be boring! They turned out a little too moist to really be classified as a muffin but they are healthy enough to be breakfast.

3/4 cup oat flour*
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons ground flax seed
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp lemon zest (optional)
1 ripe banana
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup almond milk**
1 tbs orange juice
1 tbs vanilla extract
2 cups blueberries (this is a lot of blueberries feel free to use less)

Streusel Topping
2 tbs flour
2 tbs brown sugar***
2 tbs cold earth balance

* Instead of going out and buying oat flour just grind up some oatmeal, you can use a mortar and pestle like I do or use a blender or a food processor, basically anything will work oatmeal is on the fragile side.
**We've been using almond milk lately and enjoying it much more than soy milk, and using the soy free variety of earth balance, and my body has really seemed to appreciate less soy in my daily diet.
***I mix up my own brown sugar, just with turbinado and molasses. If you can find vegan brown sugar my hat is off to you but I never found a reliable source here in Vegas for vegan brown sugar or powdered sugar so I make my own and buy vegan turbinado sugar in bulk. Brown sugar really is just molasses and sugar, Martha Stewart told me so.

Make your streusel first, just mash it all together with your fingers.
Start with this,                                                              end with this!

Set your streusel aside, but not next to the oven or it will melt. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line a muffin pan. In the bowl of a standing mixer add the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, flax seed, and lemon zest) and mix until just combined. In a separate bowl mash your ripe banana and then add the wet ingredients (oil, almond milk, orange juice, vanilla extract) and whisk it into the mashed banana. Make a well in your dry ingredients and our the wet ingredients slowly in.

Mix on low speed until just combined, add the blueberries and gently fold them in by hand. If your using frozen blueberries toss them with 1/2 tsp flour before folding them into the batter, this will keep them from turning your batter blue. Divide the mixture evenly between your muffin pan (about 1/4 cup of batter per liner) then divide the streusel topping between the muffins, bake for 18-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted all the way through comes out clean. I realize this a broad range for baking time, but it's hard for me to give an exact estimate because I have an old electric oven that gets really hot and burns everything, if you have a more reliable oven you'll probably have to bake them a little longer.