Chocolate Protein Pancake Muffins

One of my very first blog posts was my Protein Pancake recipe that I used to make every week for breakfast. I seriously loved eating those every morning, but after I started prepping my mom's breakfasts and lunches along with my own, I unfortunately didn't have much time anymore to prep my pancakes too. Anyways, I decided to bring it back for my mom to try and I experimented with this muffin version. The only additional ingredient I used was Flaxseed and that was solely to sneak in some extra nutrients into this meal for her. The recipe below makes 9 muffins and if you are enjoying this as a meal I recommend having at least 3, which puts the meal at 20g Carbs, 8g Fat, and 19g Protein. I personally like using the single serve blade assembly on my Ninja blender because it's easier to clean up, so I ended up just making two batches of the recipe below to get 18 muffins for the week. If you are using a bigger blender though you can easily double the ingredients below. Of note, I ended up filling the muffin tins a little above 2/3 of the way full and although they alarmingly rise in the oven, once they were out of the oven and cooled down they shrunk back down. The bottoms actually shrunk in a lot more then the top, so they turned out looking a little odd, but they still tasted delicious! I'm curious if I need to add more oats of flaxseed to prevent that issue, so I'll most likely be experimenting with this one again. Anyways, this was not only an extremely easy recipe to prep for breakfast, but now my mom is enjoying chocolate muffins all week for breakfast. Happy mom, happy life! Let me know if you try these out please! 

​Protein Pancake Muffins
Servings: 3 muffins = 20C/8F/19P (Makes 9 muffins)
Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup Gluten-Free Oats (I used Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Quick Cooking Rolled Oats)
• 2 Tbsp Flaxseed (I used Bob's Red Mill Golden Flaxseed Meal)
• 2/3 cup Egg Whites
• 1 1/4 Scoop Protein Powder (I used 37g of this Paleo Protein)
• 1 Banana
• 2 Tbsp Almond Butter (or other Nut Butter)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Mix together all ingredients in blender.
2. Spray muffin tin pan with nonstick spray, oil, or use muffin liners and fill ⅔ way full. 
3. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.