If ever there was a labour of love in cooking it has been these muffins! We’ve been through so many remakes and tweaks that you wouldn’t even believe. All I wanted was a nice fluffy chocolatey muffin with a marmalade centre but they’ve taken so long to get right. Make no mistake though, now they are oh so right! The muffin is light and fluffy but dark and chocolatey and the hit of zesty orange from the marmalade is just right.
Marmalade is another of those things, you love it or hate it. I’m with Paddington Bear – I love it. But I love it on hot toast and I’m not sure I could get on board with marmalade sandwiches (please don’t tell Paddington)! In all seriousness though, it works really well in these muffins to give that classic chocolate orange flavour combination.
Going into creating this recipe, I really thought it would be fairly easy to perfect to share with you. If you’ve got a basic muffin recipe that you use as your go-to, then you can just tweak that to whatever you’re using it for, right? Wrong. If you add cocoa powder to it to make chocolatey muffins, then you have to account for the fact that you’ve put an extra dry ingredient in and the mixture will have less moisture. So then you need to add more of one of the wet ingredients so your end result isn’t dry and nasty – but you have to experiment (for experiment, read “guess”) at how much to add and it can’t be too much or the muffins will be heavy and soggy, and it can’t be too little or they will still be dry! So I think you’re seeing what I mean about a labour of love here! Baking has always been the most challenging part of cookery for me – otherwise it might possibly have been easier to get this right.
Cookery is a rollercoaster ride – the disappointments of something you thought was going to be delicious turning out, quite frankly, a little bit meh and the “high” of finally getting something right. To be honest, with food blogging and perfecting recipes to share with people, for them to enjoy there is sadly a lot more of the former than the latter. But with most recipes you do eventually get the extremely rewarding high of getting something right that you’ve been working on for week and then the even bigger reward of getting to publish something you’re really proud to put your name to.
At about this point, I would normally write a little about possible tweaks or experiments that I have planned for the recipe but I think these muffins have been through just about every possible tweak or experiment that I could think up, and if I’m brutally honest I’m done with them! Not done with eating them, you understand but done with playing around with the recipe! There was a fleeting thought about swapping the marmalade for cherry jam to make some kind of Black Forest muffins – maybe I’ll give it a go in a year or two when I can tolerate the sight of muffins again!
So let me know what you think of my Chocolate Lava muffins!. You can contact me via the comments or by using the Contact Me form on the site, or I’m also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so feel free to tag me in your posts – I love hearing from you! Enjoy DDx.
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Chocolate lava muffins
- Total Time: 35 minutes
- Yield: 20 muffins 1x
Description
Fluffy chocolate muffins with a surprise marmalade centre!
Ingredients
- 2 eggs
- 125 ml vegetable oil
- 250 ml milk
- 250 g caster sugar
- 400 g self-raising flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 50 g cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 100 g chocolate chips
- Marmalade (I used fine shred because I don’t like large pieces of peel)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/ 425°F. Line 2 muffin trays with paper cases.
- Crack the eggs into a large mixing bowl and beat lightly.
- Add the vegetable oil and milk. Beat until just combined then add the caster sugar and whisk until you have a smooth batter.
- Sift in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt then fold in, taking care not to overmix as this will make the muffins tough.
- Stir the chocolate chips in.
- Divide the mix between the muffin cases – they should be roughly half full, maybe slightly over or under.
- Drop a small (about half a teaspoon) blob of marmalade into the centre of each muffin and very gently push it down just into the batter – don’t push it all the way.
- Bake for 15 minutes until a skewer inserted in the edge of a muffin comes out clean.
- Let the muffins cool for a few minutes in the tin and then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.
- Prep Time: 20 minutes
- Cook Time: 15 minutes
