Recipe: Chocolate Orange Christmas Mini Muffins
Time Taken: An hour-ish
Ingredients: a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, 150g plain flour, a
pinch of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder, an egg, 50g sugar, 50g butter,
120ml milk, and decoration :)
Evening readers!
Today issss… Well, it’s Saturday (The weekend! Dance around!)
and it’s FIVE DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS. YEAHHHHHHH. I am more than A LITTLE excited
now about Christmas. It’s been building and, today, I can confirm that I’m
definitely excited. Officially. I’m in the festive spirit. And nothing will
stop the song in my heart. Literally, I have sung all day. A medley of
Christmas tunes. And some dance anthems thrown in to remind me of Newcastle.
The hobs on the oven have been my discs. KITCHEN RAVE.
Though before I got down with the appliances, readers, I
should report that the Christmas food shop was tackled this morning. There was
a war waged between Morrison’s and my dad’s wallet. We made it out with not one
trolley-related injury, high five! And we got EVERYTHING ON THE LIST. Possibly
for the first year ever. And we got so much more, readers. We bought the shop.
And it’s a joke because the kitchen here is so small we can’t even fit a
microwave. So our arrival home, readers, was sort of a lesson in ‘How best to
stack ten tins’ and ‘What’s safe to keep by the bleach’ and so on. There was a
lot of “Christ, I knew we already had the parsnips!” and such. But we did it! And
it’s all safely in the kitchen. Just about. THOUGH NOT FOR LONG. Muahahahahaha
:D
And, once more, through my haze of festive cheer… I was
inspired to bake! Today, I really wanted to get my bake on again. PLUS, I had
an actual excuse to justify some baking. For once, a real reason why there was
probable cause to bake! Such a rarity! See, tomorrow is another big
present-swap family-meet-up function affair. This time for all of my dad’s
girlfriend’s family brood. And I’m invited! I’m not really central to this clan,
but I enjoy going along to their do’s. They’re a lovely bunch. So I’m going
along and attending as my dapper dad’s plus one. And as I have no presents to
hand out, I’ve baked some goodies for me to give out instead, for his
girlfriend’s lovely family. :)
*Drumroll*… I’ve baked chocolate orange mini muffins,
readers! Yes I have! I to-tally invented this recipe earlier, while feeling a
little crazy, and it’s been a hazardous bake… but successful! With its many
pitfalls, this was definitely one to share on the blog. I have to remind you
all OCCASIONALLY that I’m not perfect in the kitchen. :P
So, my original logic
for this revolutionary recipe was:
1)
Even though it’s samey to yesterday’s baking
(see my ‘Cookies from Darkest Peru’ blog post) I love chocolate orange flavours
and we’ve got loads of Terry’s and shit in, so I definitely wanted to do something
to involve them.
Who could say no?
2)
We have very few other ingredients in the house
(the baking cupboard is also the cereal cupboard in my dad’s ridiculous
kitchen).
There's about this much room in there
3)
In the kitchen, I discovered little gold and red
candy cups, bought when making fudge last Christmas. How could I involve these??
Hmmm… AND SO MY RECIPE WAS BORN.
Some might say...
So, to rustle up tour own real life chocolate orange mini muffins
CHEFBEHERE STYLE, here’s what you do…
1.
Heat your oven to 200ᵒC.
2.
Line a baking try with 30 or so candy cup cases.
3.
Measure your flour, baking powder and salt into
a bowl.
4.
Heat your butter and a quarter of your Terry’s Chocolate
Orange together in a saucepan until both are melted and mixed into chocolatey
goo. Leave to cool.
5.
Measure your sugar into a large mixing bowl and
crack your egg into this bowl.
6.
Chop up another quarter of your Terry’s
Chocolate Orange, into small pieces.
7.
Add your melted butter mix to your egg’n’sugar
bowl and stir it up!
8.
Place a sieve over this bowl and sift your flour
mix through your sieve, so that it lands gently onto the batter below. Let it snow,
let it snow, let it snow!
9.
Pour your milk into this bowl and use a wooden
spoon to fold everything together.
IS MAGICALLY TRANSFORMED INTOOOO...
10.
Add your chocolate chunks and stir in (I did
forget, yes, and had to chuck the chunks over my mini muffins just before they
went into the oven – DON’T BE A COTTON HEADED NINNY MUFFIN LIKE ME).
11.
Take a teaspoon and scoop a small amount of mix
into each of the candy cups, so that they just aren’t quite full.
ChefBeHere Top Tip: I pretty much
filled my candy cups with mix and then it went and rose a tremendous amount,
overspilling some of them! So play it safe, and make more of them rather than exploding
a smaller number. Put a little mix in and I GUARANTEE it will rise.
12.
Safely transport your mini muffins into the oven
to bake for ten minutes. Get some dishes washed really quickly while they do.
Go on.
13.
When your muffins have risen and turned golden
brown, get those babies out of the oven!
14.
Rest them somewhere safe to cool (If any made
muffin love in the oven and have become one, you should just be able to pull
them apart using your hands while they’re warm).
15.
Melt the remaining half of your Terry’s chocolate
orange, either in the microwave or in a bowl held over a saucepan of boiling
water.
"I'm meltinggggggggggg!"
16.
Use a teaspoon to drizzle a little chocolate
over each mini muffin.
17.
Before the chocolate has time to set again,
sprinkle some kind of decoration on top!
ChefBeHere Top Tip: I deployed
crumbled pieces of chocolate orange brownie for decoration today. If you aren’t
lucky enough to have brownies in the kitchen to crumble, you could use those
little sugared orange slices that come in tubs with lemon slices? Or you could
whip out the chocolate sprinkles, perhaps? Or pop a chocolate button or a magic
star on each mini muffin? You don’t need a lot as they’re so small, but it’s
nice to do something to decorate. Especially if you’re giving these as gifts,
like I am.
18.
You’re all done! If you’ve baked these for a
Christmas party, arrange your mini muffins artistically on a platter and pop
them out on the buffet or offer them around to guests. If you’re giving them as
gifts (like me!), find some takeaway tubs out that will fit your mini muffins and
design a bunch of playful tub labels, to remind people what it is you’ve baked
for them when they’ve forgotten after a few drinks. If you’ve made these all
for yourself, pick your most splendid-looking mini muffin to start with… and
tuck in! Yolo.
Here’s my babies all ready in
their boxes for tomorrow!
And here was the mini muffin saved just for me! I say 'was'...
And there you have it, readers. Another
delightfully tempting and terribly indulgent bake. Straight from the ChefBeHere
kitchen. This recipe was a little crazy along the way, and I know my mini
muffins rose so much they didn’t come out looking tidy. And the eagle-eyed
among you will have spotted that I stuck my brownie chunks on using writing
icing in the end, having burned my melting chocolate in its pan. Again. I KNOW.
I was too distracted with my singing! What’s a girl to do. But, despite ALL
THAT… I think they’ve come out good!
Readers, I ate one: it tasted
gorgeous. They look crazy but not… offputting?? Have you been put off by the
photo them? I don’t think so. No! I think people will still want to put these
in their mouths. I hope they will. Come on, they’re not that bad! They’re
nottttt! THEY’RE MADE WITH LOVE. There you have it. And tomorrow I will be
handing them over with love, and not worrying what people think of them. Because
they aren’t. That. Bad.
I think this bake demonstrates,
readers, that one key to a successful bake in the kitchen is just confidence. Approach
your recipe with confidence, be confident that your baking you’ve produced is
top-notch (it probably is!), hand it over like you owned it in the kitchen, hold
your head high and as long as you aren’t poisoning anyone then all will be
fine. At least you tried.
And you should! You should go try
this recipe, readers. Go have a shot at it! Because when you’re not overfilling
candy cups and forgetting about your chunks, then BURNING the bloody chocolate, you
could be crafting some upstanding mini muffins, I believe. So please, please, go try this recipe out and
let me know how you get on. Can anyone make this work?? Can you bake some gold
standard mini muffins using this recipe? Is the recipe still decent, despite
all my song-related shenanigans in the kitchen? Ready. Set. BAAAKE!
Sing (don’t
singe) my superstars
And always be safe,
Hayley
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