Who says you can’t have chocolate for breakfast? Try these bakery-sized chocolate and orange muffins for the best of both worlds – chocolate and fruit! With a soft and fluffy muffin base and no mixer required, you’ll be making these every weekend!

this recipe!

Is there anything better than a great cup of coffee and a freshly baked muffin on a lazy weekend morning? No, there isn’t. I love a great muffin, like these chocolate zucchini muffins or these blueberry peach muffins. If you have a great muffin base recipe, the mix-ins are endlessly versatile and a great way to use what you have!

Ingredients

These muffins came about because I talked into a bag of oranges by a grocery store worker – they were fresh off the presses and looked amazing so I couldn’t resist. But, like, 12 oranges is a lot a single gal. So, ta-da, chocolate and orange muffins came about.

This recipe uses my go-to muffin mix. It makes for an incredibly fluffy and flavorful muffin thanks to a combination of ingredients. Most of these you probably have in the pantry as we speak!

• All-purpose flour. The perfect flour for muffins. Bread flour would be too tough and cake flour is too light for all our mix-ins.
• Baking powder and baking soda. This gives us the lift and a classic domed top.
• Unsalted butter and neutral oil. Using a combination of butter and neutral oil (like canola or vegetable – any oil without a flavor) gives us the flavor of butter and the soft and moist texture from oil.
• Granulated sugar and brown sugar. Sweetens and helps to brown the top of the muffins.
• Buttermilk. Provides the moisture and the tang.
• Sour cream. The last bit of added moisture and softness to the mix. It also helps to activate the baking soda.
• Orange juice and zest. Part of the buttermilk in the recipe was substituted for orange juice, which doesn’t carry a ton of flavor on its own. We need to add the zest in too! A microplane is a great for this, it’s one of my top 5 kitchen utensils.
• Chocolate Chucks. I always prefer to use a chopped up baking bar instead of chocolate chips when I can. I love having the different sized chunks, plus the quality of chocolate is just better. Chocolate chips have added ingredients that helps them hold their shape, I’d prefer a puddle of all chocolate!

Making These Orange Muffins

I love making muffins because it’s so easy and doesn’t require a mixer! Two bowls, a whisk and a spatula is all you need. Funny enough, it’s called the “muffin mixing method” in the baking world, and it’s used for quick breads like pancakes, muffins, even some cakes.

In the first bowl, sift or whisk together you dry ingredients. If I’m not in a hurry, I like to sift the ingredients to make sure I don’t have any flour clumps.

In the second bowl, whisk together all your wet ingredients. In this mixing method, sugars are considered a wet ingredient. This is because sugar melts in the oven, making it a liquid!

Next, combine the two bowls. Now is the time to switch to a spatula and gently fold the ingredients together. This means you want to gently scoop and turn the bowl until everything is all incorporated, not whip or beat it together, to prevent a tough muffin.

This can easily result in some flour pockets, so really take your time and make sure everything is nicely stirred together.

Finally, stir in the chocolate chunks. I left a few out of the batter so I could pop a few chunks on top after scooping into the muffin tins. Just for the aesthetics of it all.

Baking a Domed Muffin

The baking is very important for muffins. It’s the only time you want that muffin top!

To achieve this, you’ll see that we start with a very hot oven, 425°F. This is to give us that initial “spring” in the oven for a nice tall muffin dome.

But baking the entire time at this hot temperature will give us a dry, sad muffin. So after the first 5 minutes, we turn down the temperature to a more comfortable 350°F for the remainder of the time.

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