Chocolate Muffins

I did a thorough search for chocolate muffins, as I did for poppy seed, and kept going back to the almond poppy seed muffin recipe that I liked so much.  I finally decided just to adapt that recipe.  It worked so well, I plan to make blueberry muffins next week!  I'll let you know how that goes.

This makes a dense muffin that is sweet, but not too sweet, because there so much cocoa in the recipe.  You can probably reduce the cocoa and increase the sugar to your liking.  I also considered adding 1/4 cup water to the recipe, as I had seen in others, but left it out because a heavier muffin was what I was looking for.  For us, these muffins were delicious just the way they were, but I may tweak them for fun later.

One difference between this recipe and the poppy seed recipe is that the chocolate muffins contain no baking powder--only baking soda.  I noticed in all the other chocolate muffin recipes that this was the case, and I thought they would taste better this way.

I had enough batter for a dozen muffins, plus one more.  I put a muffin liner in a very small Pyrex bowl and placed it on a pie tin on the bottom rack of the oven.  It took several minutes longer to bake, but I was glad I didn't waste any of that delicious muffin batter.

½ cup brown sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup sour cream

¼ cup milk

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1/3 cup cocoa

½ cup mini chocolate chips

Heat oven to 325°F. Line 12 medium muffin cups with paper baking cups.

In large bowl, stir together 1/2 cup brown sugar, the oil, egg and vanilla. Beat in sour cream and milk with spoon until blended.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cocoa and chocolate chips and stir until well blended. Make a well in the flour mixture.  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir just until moistened (batter will be lumpy).

Divide batter evenly among muffin cups (I used a large scoop). Bake 16 to 20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean (tops will look cracked). Remove from pan to wire rack. Makes one baker’s dozen.