This weekend I was browsing around pintrest which is a new procrastination tool of mine. I was scrolling through the recipes looking for something easy and yummy to bake for a visit to my mum’s on Sunday. It was Mother’s day yesterday in the UK so I wanted to make something a little new, a little different for my lovely mummy (and my daughter, Nanna, and sister who were there too!) and I came across this recipe and thought it sounded pretty darn good.

Ingredients:

chocmuff

  • 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • pinch of salt (1/2 tsp in original recipe)
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil (any tasteless oil is good here!)
  • 1 large egg, beaten

Method:

  1. Okay, so first you want to preheat your oven to gas mark 6 or the equivalent.
  2. Next grab out a couple of bowls, bun trays ( muffin trays if you want BIG cakes!) and a wooden spoon.
  3. Okay, into the smaller of your two bowls put your dry ingredients, sift them if you like! Flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder and sugar. Mix it up.
  4. Okay, now grab your large bowl and crack the egg into it. Add your oil and milk and whisk it up until everything is evenly mixed. Now dump the dry ingredients into the wt ingredients and stir.
  5. MASSIVELY HUGELY IMPORTANT NOTE if you want that springy, holey, nummy muffin texture you do not want to stir too much. Just until you can’t see any big clumps of dry ingredients. Yes, it will look lumpy, yes, there may be little pools of liquid you’ve not incorporated but that is GOOD, trust me. I’ve over stirred many a muffin mix.
  6. Okay, so now you split your muffin mix between your cases. I got eight large muffins out of my mix. You could make little cupcake sized mini muffins jsut as easily, I guess you’d get around 16-18 muffins ish if you did that. Just make sure not to fill your cases much more/much less than 2/3 full. That gets you a nicely filled muffin case once they’ve risen.
  7. Slam said muffins into your oven and leave then for 15 minutes. Have a quick peek and (if they’re looking done enough) a quick poke. If you’re doing mini muffins your babies will probably be done by now. Check by inserting a tooth pick/ skewer and seeing if it comes out clean. My big muffins took 20 minutes to cook right through. I left mine in the trays to cool (I was just being lazy) and I don’t think it impacted on the process at all. But put them on a wire rack if you want, I won’t stop you. :)

Okay, so I think these muffins might be perfectly delicious on their own. They’re quite dense and fudgey but it was mother’s day so I wanted to add icing! Now, If I’m going to be icing chocolate cakes I will very often fall back on a dark chocolate frosting recipe I found on the internet many moons ago. I have it written down somewhere but I never actually look at the recipe. I make it up as I go along. So the american style frosting jumped to mind but I had no dark chocolate in my baking cupboard. So I substituted Milk chocolate instead. This makes a very sweet icing but as the muffin is so dense and dark it worked pretty well!

I pretty much made this up as I went along, this is the aproximate measurements I used.

  • 1 ounce (ish) milk chocolate
  • 1 ounce (ish) butter
  • 1 tablespoon milk (maybe a splash more)

I combined these 3 things in a bowl and whacked ’em in the microwave. I normally do this in a pan but as I was cooking tea at the time I had no room on my stove! So I heated on high for a minute, stirred, heated on high another minute and stirred again. Everything went melty and gooey -perfick.

Next ingredient: Icing Sugar

Yep, I’m not going to give you measurements because at this point you just sift in as much icing sugar as it takes to turn your liquid goop (tasty liquid goop, mind) into a nice, stiff icing. I reckon I used between a cup and a cup and a half of icing sugar to get the consistency I wanted.

Now, my mummy dearest gave me a very nice piping bag set for Christmas so I set about using it. Normally I’d just blob the icing ontop of cake of choice, spread it about a bit and add sprinkles. It looks pretty good and it all tastes the same. But I went chefy on these babies hence why you’ve got a photo of one of’em. It’s the only one where the piping really properly worked!

But the finished product was a nice, fudgey muffin with a light, sweet, chocolatey frosting with chocolately sprinkles.

Nom Nom Nom.