I thought, if I’m going to make chocolate muffins, I’ll be really serious about it. And what’s even better than chocolate? Exactly. Irish cream. Luckily, I stumbled across the vegan Baileys recipe by Oh She Glows a while ago and tweaked it a little. My version is here. Based on that I came up with these muffins.
And what’s almost as good as chocolate? Little Pretzels. They made their first appearance only recently and stayed.
I ate one fluffy muffin right away when they came out of the oven back then to check if there is some kind of lava-effect when serving them fresh (at least a little) and then I ate two more (to triple check). After that I went to a yoga class and wondered why I seem to be a little unbalanced today until I remembered the whiskey!
Maybe that was just in my head and allegedly alcohol evaporates anyway when baking, but remember to point it out to people when offering those booze infused yummy little things for St. Patrick’s day or somewhere.
The most important ingredient is the chocolate. I once had boring stale dark chocolate left and thought I could use it up in those muffins, but I ended up with boring stale muffins.
You want to make sure the chocolate is great! My favourite is Rapunzel’s vegan Nirwana*.
By the way, I like the muffins best fresh from the oven or later from the fridge, where the chocolate hardens and adds a different texture.
What’s the best way of serving the muffins?
The little pretzels on the muffins become stale over night. So if you’re preparing them in advance, I suggest storing the muffins, the chocolate frosting and the pretzels separately in airtight containers in the fridge and assembling them not too long before serving. The frosting can quickly be warmed up in hot water.
Or, if you have leftover ones you want to eat the next day, you can also just remove the pretzels, warm the chocolate frosting with a hot spoon and replace the pretzels with fresh ones.
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE & IRISH CREAM MUFFINS
Ingredients
- 360 ml vegan Baileys
- 180 g all-purpose flour
- 75 g coconut sugar
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 80 ml canola oil
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- 1,5 bars of vegan chocolate
- 1 teaspoon cocoa butter*
- mini pretzels
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180° C/ 375° F and line the muffin pan.
- First, gather all your ingredients and prepare them in the right amounts. That makes it so much easier and more fun and you're less likely to forget anything.
- Combine flour, coconut sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and vanilla powder in a bowl and stir well. Of course you could also use a liquid vanilla extract, just add it to the liquid ingredients.
- Add the vinegar and oil to the Irish cream and stir well.
- Then mix everything together until combined.
- Fill the paper cups only to 3/4.
- Then chop up 1 bar of chocolate, add it into the middle of the muffins und push it down with a little fork. Attention: This step is very important. I once simply stirred the chopped chocolate directly into the dough bowl. That made it and spread too evenly. The result was a weird texture. And the one time I was too lazy to push the chocolate down and thought, they will sink anyway during the baking process, the process was an extremely uneven top. The muffins couldn't rise properly. They tasted good, but looked a bit too rustic.
- Bake the muffins for about 25 minutes.
- Take the muffins out of the oven, let them cool off a little bit.
- Melt the 1/2 bar of chocolate and the cocoa butter in a little pot in a bigger pot with hot water. The chocolate shouldn’t get warmer than necessary for melting.
- Then apply the frosting and put a little pretzel on each one.
- Pour a little more chocolate over the pretzel.
Notes
