
Light orange, sweet chocolate, and a splash of vanilla make for a breakfast you can look forward to.
Baking Adventures In A Messy Kitchen
A blog about healthy baking, with occasional dips into decadence.
Why are these called Chocolate Cupcake-Muffins? Because they are muffins, and they are cupcakes, and they are delicious. They can be eaten for breakfast or for dessert. They can be eaten plain, or with peanut butter, or with whipped cream frosting. They are made with healthy ingredients like quinoa flour and yogurt, but also required the melting of butter and the adding of cocoa powder. Hence: cupcake-muffins.
Mini Chocolate Doughnut Muffins for a snow day, that’s what these were. The kids went back to school on January 2nd, and by the 3rd they already had a day off, thanks to an insane amount of snow. We seized the moment, slept in, and then it was time for breakfast. I decided to skip the glaze so these not-unhealthy treats wouldn’t venture into dessert territory.
These weren’t JUST particularly spectacular cookies.
Yes, being Chocolate Coconut Espresso Cookies, they were destined to be delicious, and when I swapped out the chocolate chips for cappuccino chips they went all the way to sublime. But these were special cookies — not in an afterschool special kind of way — because I made them for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap
It was a beautiful, perfect, delicious bread, and a perfectly wonderful baking day. I had guest bakers! Meet Tracy and Antonia. Left to my own devices, I would have reduced or eliminated the chocolate chips, but Antonia & Tracy are huge chocolate fans and I wanted them to leave with their taste buds singing.
These were a lovely surprise.
I hadn’t done a banana-bran combination before. Well, sort of. I’d tried these Banana-Nut Oat Bran Muffins but that was oat bran instead of wheat bran and they didn’t have real flour in them and while some people liked them, I wouldn’t make them again. So they don’t count.
But I had some brown bananas sitting around, even after making my Chai Spiced Banana Muffins, and I had a hankering for something new. I also had some buttermilk to use up, and liked that this recipe looked pretty healthy but still adaptable, plus it looked like I’d get some mini muffins out of the deal as well, which are always fun.
Redemption.
The last two baked goods that came out of my kitchen were substandard, for sure. Not enough flavor, heavy, arduous texture, and especially disappointing because one came right on the heels of the other. But today things turned around at last, courtesy of these lovely. fluffy, flavor-filled orange mocha muffins.
This recipe called out to me but it took a while for me to heed the call.
First of all, it was based on a recipe by Marcus Samuelsson, whose memoir Yes, Chef was a recent and engaging, fascinating, inspiring, and delicious read. I’ve never tried any of his recipes before, and I had actually pinned this one a few weeks ago. But then I saw this version of it, which seemed to preserve the general nature of it but healthed it up a bit, finding alternatives to the sugar (which I would simply have reduced) as well as the oil.
Pretty, they’re not.
Delicious, they are. And then some. They’re bursting with chocolate and coconut with just a touch of cinnamon, and not a whisper of zucchini hits the taste buds. Amazing.
I confess that I was very, very nervous while I was making them. I changed so many elements of this recipe that I had no idea if I was going to be elated by success or depressed by failure, and then have to go hungry as well. But sometimes a baker has to take a few chances.
Ignore the word “skinny”. Really. Because these taste anything but skinny. They taste FAT in the most delightful way. Fat with chocolate flavor. Fat with cakey texture. Fat with desserty joy.
And yet they are skinny too. Low fat, Weight Watchers-friendly, and full of healthy ingredients like wheat germ, yogurt, bananas, and whole wheat white flour. They have chocolate chips too, of course, but that’s okay. It’s all about balance. And deliciousness. These muffins have that in abundance.
Finally!
This delicious, satisfying chocolate zucchini bread came on the heels of two very unfortunate baking experiments, and a last-minute mishap to boot.
Failure #1: I tried to make a zucchini bread without chocolate chips or cocoa powder. Now I know that it’s possible to make a good spiced zucchini bread, but the recipe I tried did not generate one.
jump to recipe Let me just put this out there right away: this picture does not do this loaf justice. The how-to-use-your-new-DSL-camera class doesn’t start until April, so I’m still using the automatic setting, and I baked at night, so there was no natural light to work with. So understand that the dark blob you […]
So while the Banana Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Singles were baking or cooling or in various states of I’m-not-sure-if-these-will-work-out, I started working on my back-up plan. I’d seen this recipe on Pinterest a while ago, and I loved the idea of chocolate and cloves, plus I liked that it looked a little weird in the picture. […]
I decided there were more chocolate zucchini recipes out there worth trying. So I tried one. I admit I am a little distracted today. In addition, we had our summer outing at work today, so I spent the afternoon on a boat cruising around Manhattan. It was actually quite lovely, with wonderful views of the […]
As Nathaniel & Juliet would sing, “It’s the final countdown…” All week I have been using my colleagues at work as guinea pigs. They tasted, they described, they compared and contrasted. They weighed the issues: kids have to like them, they can’t be too messy, they need to appeal to the widest variety of tastes, […]
read about Night 1 read about Night 2 Tonight was the last night of true experimentation. Whatever I make tomorrow goes to the kids at St. Philip’s Academy for Read It All Up®, and that’s that. But tonight I went back to the site where I found the extremely delicious recipe for Secretly Healthy Chocolate […]
Most people who know me know of my hatred of cooked vegetables. Unless you count corn and potatoes, which are more like starches, I don’t eat any cooked vegetables at all, ever. Oh, Dave sometimes purees some carrots and sneaks them into the spaghetti sauce, and I make carrot oatmeal muffins, but that’s really as […]
I’m not sure which I’m happier about: conquering a recipe with (liquid) coffee in it, or finally managing to successfully dust something with powdered sugar without having it look hilarious, like a 4-year-old did it. Both feel like long-awaited accomplishments, and both resulted in deliciousness. A long time ago, years before I was baking anything […]
I’m exhausted, but I wanted a treat, and I didn’t want to feel crappy about indulging. For that, this is my go-to recipe. These muffins are incredibly easy to whip together in almost no time, and they always taste fantastic. Good texture, strong chocolate flavor, boosted by a little espresso powder. It’s a very basic […]
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