Apple Cinnamon Muffins
These easy Apple Cinnamon Muffins are sure to make your kitchen smell incredible and your taste buds jump for joy. They’re also super simple to make and use common ingredients you may even have in your pantry and refrigerator. Ever since falling in love with my Banana Blueberry Muffins, I have wanted to make another variety, and apple cinnamon is one of my favorite flavor combinations. Now that it’s September, fall is on the horizon and it seemed like the perfect time to post this recipe! These Apple Cinnamon Muffins include dramatically less sugar than most traditional muffins, but they still taste perfectly sweet. Fluffy and moist, with juicy apples throughout, these muffins are so comforting and satisfying when you’re craving baked goods. I love serving these for breakfast or brunch, they pair beautifully with eggs and fruit or bacon. They also make a great snack! Each muffin is just 117 calories or 4 WW Points (or 5 WW Points if following the diabetic WW program)! To view your current WW Points for this recipe and track it in the WW app or site, click here!
Looking for more sweet or savory lightened up breakfast recipes? Check out my Banana Blueberry Muffins, Sausage and Pepper Egg Bake, Ultimate Tater Tot Breakfast Casserole, Turkey Sausage Mini Frittatas, Apple Cinnamon Pancakes, Triple Berry Yogurt Bowl, Banana Bread, Sausage Apple Cheddar Frittata, Berry French Toast Muffins, Ham and Cheese Egg Cups, Orange Cranberry Baked Oatmeal Singles, Pear Gingerbread Baked Oatmeal Singles, Apple Streusel French Toast Muffins, Ham and Cheese Hash Brown Quiche, Pumpkin Chocolate Baked Oatmeal Singles, and many more in the Breakfast section of my recipe index!
Apple Cinnamon Muffins
Ingredients
- 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
- 1 large egg
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 5 tablespoons light butter, melted (I use Land O’Lakes)
- 1 cup peeled and chopped apples
- 1 ½ cups all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon salt
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375. Mist 12 cups in a muffin tin with cooking spray.
- Combine the applesauce, egg, sugar and vanilla in a large mixing bowl and stir together with a fork until thoroughly mixed. Pour in the melted butter and stir until combined. Add the chopped apples and stir to mix in.
- In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the applesauce mixture and stir together until combined into a batter.
- Spoon the batter evenly between the prepared muffin cups. Bake for 18-20 minutes until the muffins are baked through and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Notes
117 calories, 20 g carbs, 8 g sugars, 3 g fat, 2 g saturated fat, 2 g protein, 1 g fiber (from myfitnesspal.com) MyWW SmartPoints per (1 muffin) serving:(SP calculated using the recipe builder on weightwatchers.com) Green: 4 SmartPoints/ Blue: 4 SmartPoints/ Purple: 4 SmartPoints Weight Watchers Points Plus:
3 per muffin (P+ calculated using the recipe builder on weightwatchers.com)
Have you tried making these with Measure 4 Measure flour or another gluten-free flour or baking mix? Wondered how that would be. Love the recipes! Keep them coming!
No, I’m sorry! No one in my family is gluten free, so I’ve never really looked into gluten free baking options. If you try it out, please let me know how it turns out!
Have you ever made them with a sugar substitute like truvia? Do you know how it would change the points?
Nope! I’ve only made them as presented. I’m guessing if you use a zero point sweetener they would be 3 SP each, but if you want to make changes to the recipe you’ll want to plug in the ingredients you’re using in the WW recipe builder to get an accurate total.
What variety of apples? I usually bake with Granny Smith, but not sure if you used something different for this recipe. Thanks! Looks delicious! Can’t wait to try themNn
These were delicious. My picky two year old even likes them. Thanks for a low calorie but still tasty muffin recipe!
I made these this weekend and they were wonderful! My husband loved them. Funny thing was when I was making dinner I found the butter I had put in the microwave to melt for the recipe. So they are awesome even without the butter!!
Emily – you make eating right a joy! So many of our faves have come from you (I’m thinking Buffalo Chicken Enchiladas, right now.) I entered this into the WW recipe thingy, substituting Stevia for the sugar, plus I added 2 more tablespoons of the unsweetened applesauce in place of 2 of the tablespoons of light butter, and entered 3 T. regular butter instead (since I don’t have light), and they came out at 3 Freestyle points. I’ve had such good success with substituting applesauce for the fat called for in a recipe, but thought I’d keep some of the butter in, ’cause – you know – it’s butter (= flavor & tenderness.) Using 3 T. light butter brings them down to 2 Freestyle points!
I have made these muffins twice now and my husband and I love them! They are so tasty and I love the crunch of the chopped apple in the muffin. It’s hard to find low smart point muffins and this is a winner!
I’ve made a LOT of muffins – both “lightened up” recipes and otherwise – and these are far and away our favorite! Great texture and perfect amount of sweetness. Bonus points for being super easy to make and using ingredients we always have in our pantry (we may or may not have bought a 3-pack of the large jugs of applesauce at Costco so we’ll never run out – ha). I’ve made this as written a few times, but I don’t always have light butter on hand, so I’ve also used 2-3 tablespoons of regular butter and added a few dollops of Greek yogurt or milk, clearly my baking is very scientific. I plan on trying to turn these into pumpkin muffins next by subbing the applesauce for pumpkin puree and maybe using brown sugar or maple syrup instead of white sugar? We’ll see. Thank you so much Emily for all of your hard work on this site, your recipes are staples in our house and keep healthy cooking fun and delicious!
My stepdaughters and I baked these over the weekend and we loved them! They were sweet, but not too sweet. And so easy to make! These are going on repeat!!
So excited to try these! I wanted to say that I appreciate that you don’t use sugar substitutes! I like real sugar and real butter, just less of it! Great job. This site has contributed to my 93 weight loss on WW and half my recipe book! Thanks again!
Can I substitute anything for the butter, perhaps yogurt?
I don’t have applesauce! I wonder what I could use instead?
Hm. You could try using yogurt? I haven’t tried that specifically, but I feel like it would work. I used mashed banana in a similar recipe for my banana blueberry muffins and that works great. If you have a bunch of apples, you could also make your own applesauce really easily by peeling and cutting them and then throwing them in your slow cooker with a little cinnamon and a bit of water (there’s a recipe for this on my site as well). I hope that helps!
I love your recipes!!!! I have been making the banana blueberry and apple cin. for a while now. There come out great. I was wondering if it would be okay to substitute chopped fresh peaches for the fruit and maybe almond extract instead of the vanilla? I saw the peaches and cream but I have all the ingredients for these.
That sounds delicious! I definitely think that would work.
I sub out the flour for 1 to 1 GF from Bob’s Red Mill and it works great!