Adventures in Baking: Your Average Spicy Chocolate Muffin

The humble muffin. In the case of yesterday's batch, easy to mistake for a cupcake, since the first recipe I ran into when looking for a quick, kids-will-definitely-eat-it kind of breakfast was for a Chocolate Muffin. What could be simpler, or more kids-can't-say-no-to-it?

Except, of course, that I'd completely forgotten that I had used up a main ingredient, the cocoa powder, in Ralphie's birthday cupcakes a couple of weeks earlier. And since this was a quick-and-easy recipe and I was SURE I had all of the ingredients, I didn't bother to do anything in the correct order. So by the time I realized I didn't have the cocoa powder, well, the batter was already completely put together. Sans cocoa.

If any of the four convenience stores I'd stopped at had had the cocoa powder, I would have tossed some in and we would have gotten yummy chocolate muffin breakfast goodness, and that would have been that. Only there was no cocoa powder to be found that morning. And completely-put-together-muffin-batter only missing its cocoa will only last on the counter for so long, so a trip all the way to the grocery store was out of the question. So, we ended up with two different muffin experiences - the chocolate chip cupcakes made for the kids, and the experimental chocolate cupcakes I made with the rest of the batter.

See, I had a kind of chocolatey powder at home, just not the one I'd originally had in mind. The one I had handy is one called Aztec Spice Sipping Chocolate by Dove Chocolate Discoveries. It's packaged as a spicy hot cocoa, and I wasn't going to throw it in there originally since it's an already sweetened product. But I figured, I had put in less sugar than the recipe called for anyway (habit, thanks Dad!), and it just suddenly sounded like it might be yummy to have in there. And OH MAN, was it ever! I can't tell you at ALL how much I threw in - so sorry. I just upturned the can until it looked like a good sized pile and the batter had the right consistency. But the muffin that came out was moist and chocolatey and had just a delicious amount of heat - not quite 'hot and spicy', but almost. Even the kids liked it! I am so going to figure out how to do it again!!

Thanks to Chocolatier Katie Resig, on whose DCD website I originally 'discovered' this yummy spicy sipping chocolate that ended up being the star of my morning muffins.

The original chocolate muffin recipe I followed is from joyofbaking.com - here - and my only alterations aside from the cocoa powder, discussed above, were that my chips were dark chocolate, and I didn't bother to melt the butter - the kitchen was so warm just from the weather that my stick was barely a solid to start with :).

On to Wednesday dinner planning. Have a great week!