Vegan Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins With Coconut Drizzle

These tasty vegan lemon poppy seed muffins use natural lemon zest LOTS of poppy seeds for a lightly sweet addition to your morning.

This year I promised myself (and my kids) that we’ll have muffins for breakfast every Saturday. I wanted to come up with some way to make our weekend mornings together feel more special, without giving myself too much extra work.

So I thought muffins would be the perfect way to do this; they’re pretty easy to make since all you need to do is mix the ingredients, put them into molds, and bake them.

Plus, what I’ve been doing is making them on Friday afternoon. They keep well overnight and on Saturday morning we can all wake up to a special treat.

It’s been going really well – nice to wake up and have my own breakfast made for me!

So this week, I decided to make some vegan lemon poppy seed muffins. I’m new to the vegan diet, after being a vegetarian for a year, so I had to do some experimenting to get a good recipe.

How I Created This Recipe

First, I looked up some other recipes for vegan lemon poppy seeds muffins. After trying several recipes, I was disappointed with them either coming out “gel like” or bitter.

After those failed attempts, I looked in our family recipe book which I feel like I can always trust.

I was able to successfully adapt one of my aunt’s recipes for traditional blueberry muffins (which is our official state muffin in Minnesota, by the way). I’ve made the recipe as it was written, previously, and knew it was a winner.

Egg Free

I replaced the eggs in her recipe with aquafaba, which is the liquid in a can of chickpeas. One can of chickpeas contains about 2 eggs’ worth of aquafaba (I use 4-5 Tbsp as one “egg”). I freeze my extra aquafaba in silicone molds so that I always have some on hand.

Oat Milk

I used oat milk for the liquid in this recipe. I think it turned out well, but I will experiment with using other types of plant-based milk in baking since they may yield different results.

To Ice, or Not To Ice?

This recipe produces muffins that are lightly sweet. I thought they would be great with a little extra icing on top, so I created a quick icing that combines powdered sugar, water, and coconut oil to make just enough icing for 12 muffins.

I also tested out dipping the hot muffins into a bowl of sugar. The sugared-top muffins look really sparkly and dreamy, I think!

I asked my daughter (who is my main recipe taste tester, because while I will eat just about anything, she is the pickiest eater of the family, and if it’s not good, she’ll tell me!) which one she liked better, the muffins with icing or the ones dipped in sugar.

She said she prefers the sugar-dipped muffins. Personally I like the ones with icing more, because I don’t usually like extra sugar falling off when I’m eating something. But, you can go with whichever version you like!

Muffin Tins

For this recipe, we made 12 muffins, which was just the right amount for the amount of muffin cups we have. I use these silicone muffin cups and I like how stuff doesn’t stick to them, making them really easy to bake with and also to clean.

One thing I would recommend with them, though, is that you place them in a glass pyrex dish, if you have like a 9×13 glass casserole dish.

I placed my silicone muffin cups on a dark metal cookie sheet and I think that’s the reason why my muffins turned out slightly too dark on the bottoms. Not a big deal, but just thought you ought to know.

See more vegan muffin recipes!

Vegan Blueberry Muffins