Peanut butter-Chocolate muffins

I had a request this week for peanut butter muffins, so I decided to update my last recipe, which were more like cupcakes than muffins because of the peanut butter spread on the top. I used basically the same recipe as for the Mocha Chocolate Chunk Muffins, but left out the espresso and added peanut butter.

Result? Um….FAIL? Because I don’t mention failures too often (mostly because they’re not all that useful until I’ve come up with a solution), I decided to include it.

Here are the muffins going into the oven (gorgeous, and they look just like last week’s muffins when they were ready to go in):

Here they are coming out of the oven:

Here’s a closeup of the spilled-over mess (which, on the bright side, is crunchy and tasty):

So, with the intention of being useful, I went online to seek out what I did wrong, and came up with this, from Chockylit’s troubleshooting on the Cupcake Bakeshop blog. Honestly, I would never have guessed this might be the problem.

1. I didn’t let the eggs reach room temperature before I started mixing (though, to be honest, I never do). Chockylit says: “I can’t stress enough how necessary it is to pre-measure all ingredients and allow crucial items like butter and eggs to fully come to room temperature.”

2. The oven might not have been fully preheated (yes, I’m kind of impatient, but at least 15 minutes had gone by since I turned it on). In the event of overflowing cupcakes, Chockylit warns: “There is a good chance that your oven temperature is too low or you have too many cupcakes in the oven at once. If the cupcakes don’t get adequate heat during the early phase of the baking process, they will overflow. I guarantee it…”

So, lesson learned. Patience, patience, patience. Keeping this in mind, here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Goat milk
1/2 cup Unsweetened peanut butter
1/2 cup Vegetable oil
2 large Eggs (Taken out early so they can reach room temperature. Patience!)
1 t. Vanilla extract
1 ½ cups Flour (I used a blend of corn and rice flours)
1 cup Honey
4 T. Cocoa powder
1 t. Baking powder
1 t. Baking soda
½ t. Salt
1 cup of Mixed nuts and crushed seeds (I used sesame, sunflower, amaranth, almonds, and walnuts)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375°F/190°C. Seriously. Make sure it’s up to this temp by the time you get  the muffins in there. Patience!

Line twelve muffin cups with paper liners.

Mix together: goat milk, oil, eggs, honey, and vanilla and whisk until well blended.

Mix flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in large bowl.

Add mixed nuts and seeds to this dry mixture.

Add liquid mixture and stir just until combined.

Divide batter equally among muffin cups. Since gluten-free flour doesn’t rise all that much, I usually fill the muffin cups to just under one centimeter from the top. Sprinkle some additional sesame seeds on top. Drop a teaspoon of unsweetened peanut butter in the middle of each muffin, then add an additional walnut half on top .

Bake for 25 minutes, or until a knife inserted into center of muffins comes out clean.

Enjoy!

Hope this recipe works better for you than it did for me! But this was a lesson learned, and I’m eating bits of the overflow as I type this, so it wasn’t a total failure.