These chocolate almond muffins are moist and exceptionally and deeply chocolatey.
There's a bakery and café in Santa Monica California called Huckleberry Café. In 2014, Zoe Nathan wrote a cookbook, Huckleberry: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes from Our Kitchen. It's a gorgeous book filled with amazing photos and recipes. It's also a great read.
I bought it just because of the beautiful photo of a loaf of bread with a giant swirl of jam through the middle featured on the cover.
This cookbook includes muffins, biscuits and scones, cakes, breads, pastries, and more. This recipe has been adapted from the book.
These Chocolate Almond Muffins land somewhere between a muffin and dessert. They are flavored with rich bittersweet chocolate but they are also loaded with nutritious ground almonds.
Ingredients in these Chocolate Almond Muffins:
Almond Paste: You can purchase it in the baking section of your grocery store (next to the marzipan), or you can make it yourself. It's mixed into the batter for the muffins.
Pantry Ingredients: Granulated Sugar, kosher salt (Diamond Crystal), baking powder, and vanilla extract.
From the Fridge: Unsalted butter and eggs.
Flours: Both all purpose flour and brown rice flour.
Bittersweet Chocolate.
Homemade Almond Paste:
While almond paste is available in your grocery store, making your own is fresher and less expensive.
All you need is almond meal/almond flour, confectioner's sugar, an egg white, a tiny bit of salt, and almond extract. Once you've made it, you can keep it for up to a month in the refrigerator and three months in the freezer.
To make the the almond paste, combine 168 grams of almond flour, 170 grams of powdered sugar, 1 large egg white, 1/8 teaspoon of salt, and 1 1/2 teaspoons of almond extract or almond paste in a food processor or a stand mixer until the mixture comes together.
Knead the mixture into a log and wrap it with plastic wrap until ready to use.
Note: The recipe for this almond paste is from King Arthur Baking.
What is the difference between almond paste and marzipan?
Marzipan is moldable like clay, and super sweet. With added food coloring, it's used to mold into decorative shapes.
Almond paste is less sweet, more coarse, and not as clay-like. It also has less sugar than marzipan. It's used in baked goods, such as Italian tri-color cookies or Dutch Rondos.
Procedure:
For these muffins, you mix the almond paste, sugar, salt, and cocoa powder until you have a sandy mixture.
Next, you beat in the butter, then the eggs and vanilla.
After that, you beat in the flours, baking powder, and the chopped chocolate on low until it's just incorporated. Scoop the ingredients into paper-lined muffin tins.
Finally, bake the muffins for 20 minutes and then sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Tips for Success:
The original recipe says it makes 16 muffins with the ingredients listed, and it says to fill the muffin cups up to the top of the rim. Mine overflowed in the muffin tin and spread out across the pan. I had to perform a little muffin "surgery" with a cookie cutter to neaten them up. I would suggest making at least 20 muffins instead, and possibly 24. Use a #16 cookie scoop and fill the muffin cups about 3/4 full.
Either way, these muffins are still amazingly delicious and totally chocolatey.
For the Dutch process chocolate, I had some cocoa rouge, which is a Dutch process cocoa but with a reddish color. To add a deeper color, I added some Dutch process black cocoa. Black cocoa is fabulous for making copycat Oreos.
If you have some standard Dutch process cocoa for these cupcakes, that's even better. I'm just trying to streamline my ingredients by using up what I have (at one time I thought I needed every variation of Dutch process Cocoa available "just in case"),
Storage:
These muffins keep well for about three days in an airtight container.
- Banana Oatmeal Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm
- Brie and Scallion Muffins from Food Lust People Love
- Chocolate Almond Muffins from Karen's Kitchen Stories
- Peach and Lavender Crumb Muffins from A Messy Kitchen
#MuffinMonday is a group of muffin loving bakers who get together once a month to bake muffins. You can see all our of lovely muffins by following our Pinterest board.
Chocolate Almond Muffins
Ingredients
- 200 grams (3/4 cup) almond paste
- 200 grams (1 cup) granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal Kosher salt
- 30 grams (1/3 cup) Dutch process cocoa
- 240 grams (1 cup plus 1 tablespoon) unsalted butter, softened
- 6 large eggs
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 130 grams (1 cup) all purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tablespoons brown rice flour
- 2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
- 260 grams coarsely chopped bittersweet chocolate (60 to 70 percent cacao)
- Confectioner's sugar for dusting
Instructions
- Heat your oven to 350 degrees F and line 20 to 24 cups of two muffin pans with muffin liners.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the almond paste, granulated sugar, salt, and cocoa powder in medium until the mixture resembles sand.
- Add the butter and beat on medium for about 2 minutes. Begin to incorporate the eggs, two at a time, beating until fully incorporated. Beat in the vanilla.
- Add the flours and the chopped chocolate and beat on low until everything is just incorporated.
- Using a #16 cookie scoop, portion the dough into the muffin pans, filling them to about 3/4 full.
- Bake the muffins, one pan at a time, for about 20 minutes. Let the muffins cool on a wire rach.
Nutrition Facts
Calories
271Fat (grams)
18 gSat. Fat (grams)
9 gCarbs (grams)
26 gFiber (grams)
2 gNet carbs
24 gSugar (grams)
17 gProtein (grams)
4 gCholesterol (grams)
75 mg
J'adore almond paste! I really like homemade too. These look amazing, such a fantastic crumb, definitely on my to make list.
ReplyDelete