Kids Cooking Thursday: Chocolate, Orange, and Chocolate Chunk Muffins

Chocolate, Orange, and Chocolate Chunk Muffins
from Mad about Muffins by Diana Bonaparte

120g butter
100g dark chocolate
2 oranges
a little milk
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
285g plain flour
200g light muscovado sugar
1 tsp bicarb soda
1/8 tsp salt
150g milk chocolate, roughly chopped

Preheat the oven to 190°C. Grease and flour 12 muffin tin sections or line with paper liners.

Melt the butter and the chocolate together in a bowl over a pan of simmering water until smooth.

Grate the zest from the oranges into a medium sized bowl. Squeeze the juice from both fruit.

Make the orange juice up to 190g with a little milk and combine with orange zest. Add in the egg and vanilla and mix well, then whisk this mixture into the melted chocolate and butter.

Sift the flour, light muscovado sugar, bicarb soda and salt into a large bowl. You will need to push the light muscovado sugar through the sieve with the back of a spoon.

Add the butter and chocolate mixture to the flour mixture and fold everything together until just blended. Fold in the chocolate chunks.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tin sections. Bake for 22-25 minutes until the muffins are well risen and the tops spring back when gently pressed.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool a little before eating.

This was Master Five's choice for a birthday 'cake' for his sixth birthday party. We made them ahead of time, letting them cool completely to room temperature before freezing them. I took them out of the freezer the night before the party, slapped a thin coat of Betty Crocker's Chocolate frosting (sure it's premade and full of ingredients known only by numbers, but it tastes so damn gooood!) and topped them with pirate foam shapes from the scrapbooking aisle. Because I am not so good with the freehand icing drawing.

A few little changes in technique and ingredients, we used brown sugar instead of light muscovado, and Valencia oranges, which were so juicy, we had 190ml from one orange, so Master One and I drank the leftover juice, and we didn't need any milk. One thing I found, with the brown sugar, was that if we tipped it all in a bowl and throughly mixed it through the flour first, it was easier to sift, because it didn't stick to itself so much. And as always, I melted my chocolate and butter in the microwave - it's fine if you use low temps and know what you are doing. ;)

This was an entry for
The Cookbook Challenge: Week 24 - Chocolate.

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