with salted caramel chocolate chips and low/no-added-sugar options (for those of you that are watching your sugar intake)

There’s a delightful sweet peanut buttery banana flavor in every bite of these soft, fluffy muffins laced with salted caramel chocolate chips and bits of crunchy nuts. Served hot from the oven when the chips are nicely melted, they taste like a bit of heaven with your morning coffee or tea, but you don’t have to feel guilty about eating them because they are full of fiber, protein AND you can make them without any sugar.

I’m going to mention some brands in this post … no, they didn’t pay me a cent. I didn’t even get any free product for this post! But I’m going to mention them anyway because they are part of the story.

About a month ago, I was wandering down the cereal aisle at the grocery store, looking for some cereal for my kids when I saw this Fiber One cereal. Even though I focus on eating lots of fruits & veggies, getting enough fiber is sometimes a challenge, so when I saw it had 65% of your daily fiber in one bowl, I HAD to try it. I didn’t expect to actually like the flavor or texture of it, but I really do. I mean, I like it so much that sometimes I make myself a little “snack mix” out of this dry cereal along with some nuts and dried fruit and yeah, a few chocolate chips just for fun.

Why Bran Muffins?

I couldn’t help but notice the bran muffin recipe on the back of the box, which looked tempting … I’ve always loved bran muffins, but despite the promising name, most bran muffins really don’t have very much fiber. I thought that using THIS cereal in a bran muffin sounded like a really good idea, though, so I’ve been wanting to make bran muffins for at least a month now, ever since I bought the cereal. But I didn’t want to use the recipe off the box because I wanted to add some banana or pumpkin.

I went searching the inter-webs for banana bran muffin recipes and found this one from Tastes Better from Scratch. It looked promising … I stored it away (and by that I mean left the tab open on my browser on my phone along with the bazillion other tabs I have open, just so I won’t lose them lol). Do you guys do that too? “Store” away links you don’t want to lose by keeping the tab open FOREVER?

Well, I can finally close that tab because I woke up yesterday at an ungodly hour and my brain was fixating on the 3 over-ripe bananas we had and the Lily’s salted caramel chocolate chips in my cupboard that I just LOVE. My evil bran muffin plot was going to happen TODAY!

Better for You Chocolate Chips

Have you met Lily’s chocolate chips yet? I am so head over heels in love with Lily’s salted caramel chocolate chips. They are sweetened with Stevia, have no sugar in them at all, but they taste SO good. Also, just 26 chips have 4 g of fiber. This makes me super happy! Normally I am NOT a chocolate chip eater, but these chips are so tasty all on their own and it feeds my happy zone. Plus I can munch on chocolate and not feel guilty and get my fiber in too. I have also tried their pumpkin spice chips, but the salted caramel ones are my favorite so far.

After my first taste of these chips, I HAD to immediately text a couple of dear friends, one of whom is diabetic. Of course they asked what to use them in. To that I didn’t quite know what to say because I hadn’t actually used them in anything … yet.

Reinventing Bran Muffins

So that’s where these muffins come in! It wasn’t enough that I was making BANANA bran muffins with salted caramel chocolate chips. No, when I started mixing up the batter, I just had to tweak the recipe a bit more to reduce the butter … and that got me thinking about what to replace it with … the answer came to my brain immediately: peanut butter! More good flavor, more fiber, heart healthy fat, and some protein … how can you go wrong with that? The batter tasted delightful … I was super excited now.

While my muffins were baking, my house smelled incredible! When I pulled them out of the oven, I was immediately smitten. They looked so beautiful … I could not WAIT to taste them But I told myself I had to wait. Do yoga first, THEN muffin. Still I texted my friends a quick photo to show them what I’d done with the Lily’s chips.

By the time I was done with yoga, my friends had texted me back asking when I was going to deliver them! They said we should come visit because they miss us and we should come TODAY. Well, they live 6 hours drive away from us, so while that offer sounded tempting, it just wasn’t going to happen THIS weekend. BUT we did make plans to get together very soon. So I froze some muffins and they will get their delivery when we meet up. I didn’t think a muffin delivery was actually going to happen, but it is!

Good food is so much better when we can share it with friends.