Sue's chocolate chip coffee muffins

This post is dedicated to my lovely friend and workmate Sue. When I first told her about Lavazza's Coffee,Set, Match challenge, she immediately decided that I needed to make some coffee chocolate chip muffins, and for weeks afterwards she regularly harangued asked me when they would be forthcoming. 

 

Sue is such a sweetie that I would hate to disappoint her, so coffee chocolate chip muffins were made and delivered to work, and while a few of them were shared with other workmates, most of them accompanied a gleeful Sue home - they were most definitely enjoyed! (I may or may not have eaten one for breakfast myself.)

I decided to use some cupcake cases I found in Poundland. I really love the 1960s style pattern on these, but unfortunately you do tend to get what you pay for and during the baking process they soaked up a lot of grease and went a bit see-through - not a good look. I'm on the lookout for some nice Jubilee-style cupcakes but I live miles from the nearest Lakeland - has anyone seen any good ones in the supermarkets?

Not the best quality but what a fab pattern.

Anyway, here's the muffin recipe. If you have unexpected visitors or a cake sale you've forgotten about till the last minute, these are ideal as you can be taking them out of the oven half an hour after deciding to make them! And like my fudge recipe, this is very adaptable. Leave out the coffee, use white chocolate, and add a big handful of frozen raspberries (don't defrost them first) for a lovely summery treat.

Ingredients:

280g self raising flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Good pinch of salt

90g caster sugar

1 egg

250ml plain yoghurt

90ml semi skimmed or whole milk

90ml vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 shot of espresso (I used a Lavazza Caffè Crema Lungo Dolcemente pod)

100g chocolate, chopped (I used milk chocolate as I wanted a bit of sweetness to counterbalance the coffee, but dark would be fine, as long as it's a fairly low cocoa content)

Preheat the oven to 225ºC and get your muffin tin ready with paper cases.

Sieve the flour, bicarb and salt into a large bowl (or tip it all in and give it a whisk to get rid of any lumps).

Beat the egg and sugar together in a big measuring jug. Add the yoghurt, milk, oil, espresso and vanilla, and give it all a really good mix with a fork or small whisk.

Pour the wet stuff into the dry stuff, and fold it all together with a big spoon. Don't overmix - you want it to stay lumpy. Finish by folding in the chopped chocolate.

Divide the mixture between the paper cases (you should get 12, but if you use smaller cases like I did you might end up with 14 or 15 - if so, and you can't fit two tins in the oven, you could bake a couple in silicone cases which will hold their shape in the oven without needing to be placed into a muffin tin).

Place in the oven, immediately turn the heat down to 200ºC, and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the muffins from the oven, let them cool for a few minutes till you can handle them, and then put them on a wire rack to finish cooling. They are lovely eaten while still a bit warm, as the chocolate chunks will still be melty and gooey!

Don't forget - you can win prizes  from Lavazza too!  Look out for instant win details on promotional cups of takeaway Lavazza coffee, or enter online HERE.

Prizes include pairs of tickets to Wimbledon, Lavazza A Modo Mio Favola Plus Wimbledon Limited Edition coffee machines and exclusive sets of espresso cups created especially for the tournament. 

 

1950s Royal Doulton espresso cup which is one of my favourites! 

Happy Easter!

Have you started tucking into your Easter eggs yet? This year I have a Green & Black's egg, a Mars Bar one and a Creme Egg one and I don't know which to open first!


Here's some little Easter cakes I made last week to bring along to my ukulele club. I have a new piping nozzle that's designed for hair and grass, and I wanted an excuse to use it!


They're just vanilla cupcakes with some chocolate buttercream and some tiny tiny mini chocolate eggs that I found in the pound shop. Of course I bought far too many and we'll probably still be eating them at Christmas.


This is the piping nozzle. Sorry it's so out of focus, I really need to take my husband's macro lens out of retirement so I can take decent photos of tiny things...


How are you spending Easter? I'm off to a yoga class in a minute and then we'll be having a picnic by the river so fingers crossed the sun comes back in the next couple of hours! Hope everyone is enjoying the lovely weather and has a great long weekend x

We Should Cocoa - lime and coconut madeleines with white chocolate

A blog I've been reading for ages called Chocolate Teapot runs a monthly blog event called We Should Cocoa, where you have to make something involving chocolate (well, duh) but also another ingredient that changes every month. Previous months have been caramel (wish I'd had my blog in time to enter that one!) and raspberries, among other things, and this month's ingredient is limes.

Well, I love limes. Love them. And even more so when they're paired with coconut, and even more than that when there's some white chocolate involved. So this was a no-brainer. I would make some white chocolate madeleines. Because madeleines are so pretty, they make just having a cup of coffee seem like a party!


My madeleine tins are from Lakeland, and they don't seem to give a very defined shape. I also have a silicone one from House of Fraser which is a much nicer shape, but the silicone just doesn't seem to give the cakes the nice colour that a metal baking tin does, so they come out looking a bit pale. I've used the Lakeland tins for these, next time I make madeleines I'll use the silicone tin to show you the difference.

Ingredients:

60g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
60g caster sugar
2 eggs
50g butter (I use salted; if you're using unsalted then add a pinch of salt in with the flour)
20g dessicated coconut (or 30g if you'd like them a bit more coconutty)
zest of 2 limes
About 25g white chocolate

Melt the butter and leave to cool a bit. Whisk the sugar, eggs and lime zest together, preferably with an electric hand whisk or mixer, until they have increased in volume, are very pale and thick and the mixture leaves a ribbon-like trail.

Sift in the flour and baking powder and fold it in gently. Then drizzle over the butter and fold that in gently too, and finally the coconut. Really try to be gentle so as not to knock the air out of the mixture. Stick the mixture in the fridge for an hour or two.



When you're ready to bake the madeleines, preheat the oven to 210ºC. Lightly grease a 12 hole madeleine tin. I use a low fat cooking spray. Fill each hole about two thirds full (I got 14 madeleines out of this mixture, so you might have to bake in two batches unless you've got two tins).

Bake for about ten minutes, or until they are golden and springy when you press lightly on them. They should easily fall out of the tin. Cool on a wire rack.

When cool, melt the white chocolate. BE CAREFUL, especially if you're using a microwave, because white chocolate burns really easily and burnt white chocolate is disgusting. Pour the melted chocolate into a plastic freezer bag and snip off the corner, or make a piping bag from baking parchment if you prefer, and drizzle the chocolate all over the madeleines.


Perfect with a cup of coffee! These are really best eaten on the day they're made.

I'm starting my new job tomorrow, and I can't wait! Wish me luck :)