Gothic Muffins

I actually created these for my school drama society since drama tends to have a preoccupation with the colour black. It turns out that the icing leaves a bluish-black stain on teeth and lips and tongue [temporarily, not to worry!] because I added in quite a lot of food colouring. Only after I got a few comments about them being 'gothic muffins' did I realize this would be a good treat for halloween [which is coming up in about three months time!]. Kids enjoy this - watching their mouths turn black - whether parents will is a totally different matter.

The muffins are my very own recipe, based on rough experimentation one night - and i hit it right it seems, after testing it out on classmates at school. The icing, however, is Nigella Lawson's Buttercream Icing and the recipe can be found in How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

DOUBLE CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFIN RECIPE

23/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
12 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup Hershey's Cocoa powder [you can vary the amount]
2 cups Hershey's chocolate chips [again, you can vary it to your preferrence]

Simply whisk the flour, sugars, baking powder and soda, salt together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, blend all the wet ingredients till they've incorporated well. Then, slowly add the dry ingredients to the bowl of wet ingredients. Bit by bit, folding it in gently. You can use the electric beater but I prefer to do it by hand because overbeating the muffins can make them 'tough'. Add the chocolate chips, all the while folding in the dry ingredients. Once it's well combined, it should look like this.

The actual colour is a much darker and richer chocolate but my camera was malfunctioning that night and that's why it looks orangey. Anyway, the more cocoa powder you add, the darker it gets.







Scoop the batter into 12-cup muffin tins, each cup lined with a cupcake holder [in my case, mine were black]. Don't worry if the batter is extremely gloopy - the runnier it is, the less tough it will be. Which is a good thing. It's up to you how much you want to scoop, because these muffins rise up a lot it's up to you how big you like them. I like them huge, but seeing as I had to add icing, I was less generous. Bake for about 20-25 minutes at 180C





Then I made the icing with nigella's recipe. It's very simple, and if you're not particular about how your icing is going to taste, you can probably just experiment on your own - icing sugar is a must of course. personally I've never cared much for icing. I don't like my food all prettied up and far too sweet. The food colouring i used was COAL BLACK colouring. It wasn't completely black and that's why I just kept adding more and more. Be wary though, these things contain lots of food additives and if you're giving these away make sure that person doesn't have food allergies - but the whole drama society survived so my guess is that it's quite safe.





WARNING! it's an awfully messy business working with black food dye and i was left with black nails and fingertips for a week.



Okay, back to the muffins. So after they were baked, this was how they were. I then had to get down to the tedious and messy task of icing them. I intended to pipe words at first, but it was troublesome so I decided to just cover the lot. It's much easier to ice flat-topped cupcakes but I have a personal weakness for muffins and that's why I chose to do this with muffins. Particularly good muffin recipes can be found from Mrs. Fields cookbooks.







This recipe makes about 18, but then again it all depends on how you size your muffins, and you can always play around with the ratio of the measurements. So there you have it, Gothic Muffins.