Muffin-crushing

Dani has been fantasizing about Toblerone muffins ever since she discovered the recipe about a year ago. We have made many plans to bring this dream into reality, all of which have fallen through. We came very close recently, even purchasing the two necessary bars of Toblerone. This attempt was foiled, though, by a collective failure of self control, which resulted in the consumption of 1.5 of aforementioned bars. While I am not a recipe stickler, even I will delay baking when I am missing 3/4 of the recommended chocolate.

On Wednesday we managed to obtain replacement Toblerone. After consuming a painfully healthy dinner of cauliflower and millet (produced by Wilma. It was actually quite delicious), we set about constructing these nutrition-free muffins.

Toblerone Muffins

adapted from Sweet Endings by Sharon Glass

* 2 1/2 cups flour

* 1 tbsp baking powder

* 2/3 cup sugar

* 1/2 cup ground almonds

* 6 tbsp butter

* 1 egg

* 1 cup buttermilk

* 1/4 cup milk

* 1 1/2-2 bars Toblerone

Preheat oven to 375˚ F.

Chop the chocolate. Note: I had Dani do a very rough chop. This meant the chocolate was not well distributed throughout the muffins. For this reason, the few Toblerone chunks were extra special, but a slightly smaller chop would have meant more chocolate encounters, therefore more delicious muffins.

Have your faithful assistant mix the dry ingredients, including the sugar and almonds. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the buttermilk/milk (it can all be buttermilk, but it was easier for me to do 1/4 cup milk and I am lazy), then the egg. Make sure to whisk constantly so the egg does not cook.

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined. Fold in the Toblerone. Either grease a muffin tin, or fill with muffin cups. The recipe said 6 muffins would come from a batch, but we ended up with 12 reasonably sized muffins. Bake for 20 minutes. Let cool before eating.

Final consensus: The muffins were far from inedible - Dani, in fact, polished off two fresh out of the oven. On the other hand, they were not spectacular. I attribute the mediocrity to the actual muffin part (obviously the slightly melty Toblerone was out of this world). The muffin was pale, bland and too milky (maybe if I had used buttermilk instead of a combination of buttermilk and milk this would have helped. Maybe not). In theory, a plain muffin base is ideal to support a flavor such as that of Toblerone. In this case, though, I was underwhelmed. Upon further contemplation, Dani and I concluded that perhaps more egg and less milk, and/or finer chopped chocolate, and/or a chocolate muffin would have produced a more cohesive and delicious overall muffin experience. I would not repeat this exact recipe, but I would certainly experiment with it.

Final final note: While we were baking, Dani brought to my attention her opinion that the pictures in this blog are sub-par. I would like to take a moment to apologize profusely to the world (aka the only important people in the world aka the people reading this) for the not-as-amazing-as-apparently-they-should-be food images that I have been subjecting you to. I hope you can forgive me until the day when I am a famous food-tographer with a real camera and real skills. Sorry.