Vegan Apple Berry Crumble Muffins

Wholesome vegan apple berry muffins with a crumble topping. Like vegan apple muffins but studded with mixed berries and a crunchy oat struesel! These muffins are better than the ones from your corner bakery and are great as a healthy vegan breakfast or snack.

Love healthy breakfast muffins? You may also like my banana bread, white chocolate and raspberry muffin recipe!

Ingredients you'll need

These vegan apple berry muffins use very common ingredients including:

• Plain or all-purpose flour or can be substituted with whole wheat or spelt flour.
• Any plant-based milk such as soy, coconut, almond or oat
• Coconut sugar, brown sugar or cane sugar (or a mix). I prefer granulated sugars over liquid sweeteners like maple syrup as the former makes baked goods fluffier.
• Light-tasting vegetable oil such as sunflower or rapeseed oil. I prefer this over coconut oil or vegan butter as the latter tend to solidify at room temperature making baked goods feel more dry.
• Grated apple. I used a food processor to grate mine but if you have a hand-held grater, you can see Cook's Illustrated guide on grating apples.
• Fresh or frozen mixed berries
• Baking powder + salt + cinnamon (not pictured)
• White or apple cider vinegar

If you don't have access to mixed berries (or any berries), this recipe works as just vegan apple cinnamon muffins.

You don't need a vegan egg replacer (such as flax eggs) for these muffins. The grated apple helps bind the ingredients together! However, I did add a little more baking powder to make sure the muffins are FLUFFY.

To make the crumble, you'll need:

• Vegan butter or solid coconut oil
• Rolled oats
• Flour and sugar, of choice

How to make these muffins

I'm a huge fan of simple recipes and these vegan apple berry muffins are no exception!

First, add all the dry ingredients to a mixing bowl and mix until there are no lumps. Add the wet ingredients and mix until just combined (or stop right before the batter is combined). It'll be a very thick batter because the fruit will leak water when the muffins are baking.

Add the berries and fold through!

I like to divide my cupcake and muffin batter using an ice cream scoop. It makes all the muffins the same size and the little 'scoop' function is a dream when working with thick batters!

Making the vegan crumble mix

Simply add all the ingredients to a small / medium bowl and mix until combined. We want the crumble (or struesel) to resemble large flakes aka crumbs!

Once you've made the crumb topping, distribute the batter in your muffin tin and sprinkle your crumble on top. The crumble adds a wonderful CRUNCH to the muffins!

Baking the muffins

As there's a lot of fruit in the muffins, they take a little longer to bake than regular vanilla-based cupcakes, such as my lime coconut cupcakes. I prefer medium/large-sized muffins so 25-30 minutes in the oven was perfect for mine!

Customising this recipe

To make healthy vegan muffins, you can replace plain flour with whole wheat flour or spelt flour. You may also replace oil with applesauce, though it will make the muffins more dense.

As mentioned above, I do not recommend using a liquid sweetener such as maple syrup instead of coconut palm sugar for the muffins. Liquid sweeteners often weigh down baked cakes and we don't want to eat a dense rock!

To make gluten free vegan apple berry muffins, substiute the plain flour with a blend of almond meal and a gluten free flour blend (check the recipe card below for exact amounts).

Or omit the berries to make simple vegan apple cinnamon muffins. Can't be bothered to make a crumble? Omit that too!

To take these muffins to the NEXT LEVEL, feel free to add vegan chocolate chips!

See my other vegan apple recipes:

• Apple Cake with Pecan Crumble
• Apple Crumble Pie
• Easy Vegan Apple Bread (loaf)
• Apple Custard Cinnamon Rolls

And vegan muffins and cupcake recipes:

• Banana Bread, Raspberry and White Chocolate Muffins
• Vegan Strawberry Cupcakes

You may also like:

This post was originally published in May 2018 and updated with an improved recipe in June 2021.

Please leave a comment below if you made this recipe, have any questions or thoughts! Your comment will help other readers and Rainbow Nourishments.