50 minutes from thought to eating. If you were organized you could probably do it in 30 but I am just not that quick!  It finally rained today so now the weather is back to normal, we needed muffins for tea! I have reduced the butter and increased the milk in this recipe by a little as I am trying to cut down on butter.

From a recipe by Diana Bonaparte in Mad about Muffins my favourite muffin book! Loads of other wonderful recipes in here, including B’s all time favourite, mint choc chip muffins and many, many more!

Preheat oven to 170 C Fan. Find muffin tin with 12 compartments, find muffin cases, find the rest of the ingredients and off you go…..

The wet stuff: two parts to this:

• 110 grams unsalted butter
• 100 grams dark chocolate

Melt 100 grams of dark chocolate  and 11o grams of unsalted butter in a pan or the microwave on a low heat just enough that the butter melts and stir until smooth.

In the meantime mix up in a separate bowl:

• 1 egg
• 100 grams plain yoghurt –  (I used homemade)
• 160 grams skimmed milk

Then add the butter-chocolate mix to the egg mix, or the other way round, just make sure the chocolate isn’t too hot or you will end up with scrambled eggy bits.

Whizz 2 nuggets of stem ginger, the sort that comes in syrup in a jar, in a food processor, or chop finely and add to the wet mix as above.

The dry stuff:

• 260 grams of plain flour (all purpose)
• 200 grams light brown muscovado sugar (sieved to get rid of the lumps)
• 10 grams ground ginger
• 1 and a half tsp of bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Sieve these together and mix well in another bowl. You now have one bowl of dry and one bowl of wet ingredients

Filling and topping – weigh these out before you mix the wet and the dry together!

• 150 grams dark chocolate, chopped up roughly or use choc chips
• one more nugget of stem ginger finely sliced into 12 slivers

OK, all set! You should have one bowl of wet stuff, one of dry stuff, one little bowl with more chocolate bits in it and a saucer with some slices of ginger.

Fold the dry mix into the wet mix, work quickly, don’t beat it,  just mix it enough that the flour has just disappeared, more like folding than beating. The batter can look quite lumpy which is fine!  Then quickly fold in the second lot of chocolate bits.  Spoon the batter  into the paper cases. Put a sliver of stem ginger on top of each one and bake for 20 – 25 minutes. Mine took 25 minutes because I think I made a bit more mixture than I meant to and so the muffins were quite big! They are done when they are well risen and spring back a little when you press them.

Cool on a wire rack but don’t wait too long to eat them, in fact invite someone round for a cuppa and then you can eat two while you are talking to them and no one will notice!

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