Yellow Squash Muffins

The perfect summer squash treat! This easy one bowl recipe for super moist yellow squash muffins is quick and easy to whip up with the season's best squash.

Jump to:

• Why you'll love these muffins
• Equipment Notes
• Ingredient Notes
• How to Make Yellow Squash Muffins
• Expert Tips
• Storage Advice
• Home Freezing
• Substitutions and Variations
• Yellow Squash Bread Loaf
• FAQs
• Looking for more easy muffins and quick breads? Try:
• Yellow Squash Muffins

Why you'll love these muffins

• Simple one-bowl recipe - you can't get much easier! This recipe takes just one bowl to bring together the ingredients. No complex equipment or processes needed. More or less just throw it all together, then bake and enjoy!
• A fun golden zucchini bread twist - if you're tired of the same old zucchini bread or have some yellow squash laying around, this recipe is made for you!
• Freezer friendly - I love a make ahead, pack the freezer sort of recipe and these summer squash muffins are it! Once baked and cooled, they can be bagged and kept in the freezer for months, for on demand muffin treats!

Equipment Notes

This recipe really only needs a few standard pieces of equipment:

• Box grater - or other reasonable sized grater to grate your yellow squash into slivers.
• A large mixing bowl - you'll want a decent sized bowl, I like to use glass or ceramic, but any mixing bowl will do here. You can also make the recipe with a stand mixer if preferred.
• Whisk - I find balloon whisks work best, but again any whisk will do! You can even get away without a whisk and just use a large spoon.
• Sieve - if I'm honest, I shortcut sifting quite a lot and just chuck the dry ingredients in! But for the best texture here, you'll want to sift the dry ingredients into the batter.
• Spatula - best practice in baking is usually to use a spatula to stir the dry ingredients in, rather than continuing to beat with a whisk. This helps avoid unnecessary overmixing which can make a bake more dense.
• 12 hole muffin tray - or a large cupcake pan. This recipe makes 12, but you can bake these in batches if you only have a small pan available.
• Wire rack - for cooling the muffins once baked.

Ingredient Notes

To make this recipe, you'll need:

• Oil - a flavorless oil, such as sunflower oil or canola oil work best here. You can use olive oil, however, olive oil does have a strong flavor, which will come through in a bake. I wouldn't normally recommend using olive oil unless you're used to baking sweet treats with it!
• Sugar - granulated sugar or caster sugar.
• Eggs - this recipe uses one whole egg and one egg yolk. The remaining egg white can be frozen for later use in a meringue, egg white omelette or other recipe.
• Vanilla extract
• Crushed pineapple - canned crushed pineapple, mostly drained. You want to remove most of the excess juices here, since the pineapple will still have a lot of its own moisture. If you can't find crushed pineapple, you can also use pineapple slices, just chop these up into smaller pieces for a crushed effect.
• Yellow squash - this ingredient comes under many names. You can use really any young yellow summer squash here. Grate using the box grater so that you have essentially flaked yellow squash.
• Flour - all purpose or plain flour.
• Ground spices - cinnamon, nutmeg and clove.
• Baking soda
• Salt

How to Make Yellow Squash Muffins

This recipe essentially follows the same process as my Zucchini Bread with Pineapple. The two key differences are that this uses summer squash and is made as muffins instead of bread!

1. Start by preheating your oven and preparing a 12-hole muffin pan. I do this by greasing and flouring the holes. You can use a trusted non-stick cooking spray or muffin liners.
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the sugar, oil, egg and yolk, vanilla, pineapple and zucchini (image 1 below).
3. Once your wet ingredients are well combined, sift in your dry ingredients - the flour, baking soda, spices and salt (image 2 below).
4. Use a spatula to stir the mixture together, ensuring that there are no pockets of unmixed flour (image 3 below).
5. Dollop or spoon the batter into your prepared pan, as evenly as possible (image 4 below).
6. Bake in the centre of the preheated oven for about 25-30 minutes, until a golden. Test they're done by using a toothpick inserted in the centre of one of the central muffins. This should come out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the pan until you're able to handle them. Then gently remove to cool completely on a wire rack.

Expert Tips

My top tips for ensuring success with this recipe:

• Make sure the pan is well coated in whatever non-stick option you're using! These yellow squash muffins are a moist bread batter, which is prone to sticking.
• The moisture is also why it is important to let them cool in the pan for about 10 minutes before removing. The muffins will pull away from the sides of the holes as they cool off initially. This helps release them and they will be firmer and more easier to handle when cool rather than hot.
• Using a cookie scoop can be helpful for dolloping out the batter more cleanly and evenly into the muffin tray.

Storage Advice

These muffins keep really well and will stay fresh for a few days.

The best way to store these is in an airtight container such as a ziploc bag or well wrapped in plastic wrap.

They are fine kept at room temperature, but their longevity will be tied to the conditions in your kitchen. In particularly hot, humid weather, you may find that they become a bit sticky/soggy after a couple of days.

If planning to save for later, I generally recommend freezing.

Home Freezing

These yellow squash zucchini muffins are perfect for homefreezing! As a 12-muffin batch bake, they're great to stock up a freezer with ready-made treats for later.

To freeze, bake as directed and allow the muffins to cool completely on the wire rack. Once cooled, you can either place in a freezer bag or wrap individually in a layer of plastic wrap topped with a layer of aluminium foil.

They'll keep in the freezer for about 3 months (I've certainly had them in there longer, but that wouldn't be best practice!).

Allow to defrost at room temperature before eating. For muffins, this usually doesn't take very long - often less than an hour, dependent on the conditions in your kitchen.

Substitutions and Variations

There's a lot of option to play around with for these muffins. Some of my trusted alterations are:

• Use zucchini - you can substitute the yellow squash in this recipe for grated zucchini. Summer squash is a great seasonal recipe, but zucchini does tend to be more broadly available in supermarkets and is an easy substitute if you've not got yellow squash on hand!
• Add nuts - yellow zucchini bread muffins are great with some extra crunch! Try adding some chopped walnuts or pecans to the recipe. About half a cup, roughly chopped, can be added and stirred into the batter at the end. This won't massively impact the baking time, just keep aware of the muffins and test them with a toothpick for doneness as normal.
• Dairy free - the recipe as written is a dairy free yellow squash muffin, but be sure that your pan preparation is also dairy free if you're needing to make these without milk product contamination. I tend to grease and flour my pan with butter, but many non-stick sprays are dairy free or simply use muffin liners.

Yellow Squash Bread Loaf

An easy alternate for this recipe is to bake the muffins as a single summer squash bread loaf. This is easily achieved using a standard 1lb loaf pan.

Follow the recipe as directed, except prepare a single loaf pan instead of the muffin tin. When the batter has been made, pour this into the prepped pan and bake in your preheated oven. A loaf will take longer to bake due to the batter being deeper in a single pan. Start checking after about 40 minutes and test using a toothpick or skewer. When this comes out clean, your loaf is ready.

Allow the loaf to cool in the pan first (just like the muffins) and then remove carefully.

Storage and freezing options are also the same for the yellow squash bread!

FAQs

Looking for more easy muffins and quick breads? Try:

• Pumpkin Banana Muffins
• Nectarine Bread
• Pumpkin Pecan Bread
• One Bowl Banana Bread
• Biscoff Banana Bread