ultimate chocolatey-chocolate muffins

I love being a mom. I love being the cook-of-the-house.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

In the last couple of weeks, I had been pretty frazzled. The little boy was ill for a week, then gave the virus to his Daddy, who was so sick he was down for a week, and now when everyone is better, the little girl has decided to go through some insomnia cycle.

Hence, the reason why I am here, at 6 in the morning, writing a blog post before having to take the little boy to school (God knows what time the LAM finally got the little girl to sleep last night) and then going to the market.

I am a Mom. Hear me *whimper*.

I guess when my helper told me yesterday that I would have to bake soon because our supply of breakfast was very low - and it must be pretty bad for her to come to remind me - I was all ready to crawl under the bed to suck on my thumb and continue to whimper.

But I decided that was not the solution, so I went to my stack of to-do-very-soon recipes and pulled this one out.

If you ever need to bake something simple, and want to impress, this is the recipe to go to.

What drew me to this recipe, besides the extra chocolate that was added to the muffin, were, firstly, the use of buttermilk. I am convinced that the addition of buttermilk makes the best muffins in the word. The second reason was the use of oil instead of butter. For some reason, this combination always results in moist and flavourful muffins. The best sort, really.

So to make these muffins, you have to melt some chocolate in a ban marie. Use the best chocolate you can get your hands on.

Once the chocolate has melted, remove the bowl carefully from the water bath, and set it aside to cool. Be careful not to let any water get into the chocolate!

Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl, I whisked the eggs and sugar until the mixture turned light and creamy.

Into this, I added olive oil and vanilla extract, since I did not have any vanilla powder. I continued whisking until the mixture thickened even more.

Then I added the flour/cocoa/baking powder/salt mixture and the buttermilk in the sequence flour-buttermilk-flour. Finally, I added the cooled melted chocolate, and mixed everything well.

I transferred the batter into a muffin pan that had been lined.

And topped the muffins with chocolate chips.

Finally, I baked them.

Every single muffin came out perfect.

They were moist, not overly sweet and really more-ish.

And so so pretty. :)

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RECIPE
Ultimate Chocolatey-Chocolate Muffins (Makes 12)
Adapted from giverecipe.com

Ingredients:
¾ cup buttermilk (or ¾ cup lukewarm milk + 2 tablespoons lemon juice)
100g dark chocolate chips - I used Valrhona 70%
2 eggs
¾ cup sugar - I used 1/2 cup
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon vanilla powder - I used 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup and 2 tablespoons plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder - I used Valrhona cocoa powder
1 tablespoon chocolate chips, for topping
1 tablespoon coarse sugar, for garnish - I omitted this

Method:
1. If you want to make your own buttermilk, mix lukewarm milk with lemon juice and wait for 20 minutes.
2. Melt chocolate chips in double boiler and wait it until it reaches room temperature.
3. Preheat oven to 180C.
4. Whisk eggs and sugar until creamy.
5. Add in olive oil and vanilla powder. Mix well.
6. Mix flour, salt, cocoa powder and baking powder in a separate bowl and sift half of it into the egg mixture gradually. Stir with a spatula.
7. Pour in buttermilk and mix until combined.
8. Stir in the remaining flour mixture gradually.
9. Fold in melted chocolate.
10. Share the batter into 12 muffin liners and top with chocolate chips.
11. Bake for 20 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
12. Cool them on a wire rack and sprinkle coarse sugar on each when they completely cooled.