This chocolate chip muffins recipe is one that I adapted from an old recipe from the time when muffins were smaller and less sweet. They’re perfect for a reasonable portion for breakfast, and they’re not going to overwhelm you with sugar.
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Prepping the muffin pan.
Start by getting the pan ready by lining it with baking cups, or spraying the bottom of each cup with oil. The liners are better because they’ll let you remove the entire muffin without worrying about anything sticking.
I used these Baker’s Signature Tulip Liners (affiliate link), the company sent me a package to test them out, and they worked really well. They’re basically a piece of folded parchment paper, so they’re eco-friendly and biodegradable, and they look nice on the muffins.
They come in three colors in the package, and it said they’re heat-safe to well over 400 degrees, which is what I needed to bake the muffins at.
I tried all three colors to see if they would change color in the oven, and to see what they looked like on the finished product. This recipe said that it made 12 muffins, so I did 4 of each color.
When these are opened up they’re a square of parchment, so you know they’re not going to stick to the muffins after they’re baked.
Get the liners on Amazon here: Baker’s Signature Tulip Liners (affiliate link)
Chocolate chip muffin recipe.
Makes 12 muffins, about 200 calories each.
Ingredients:
- 1 egg
- 3/4 cup milk (I used 2% milk)
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 2 cups AP flour
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 2 Tbsp cocoa
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- Chocolate chips to scatter on top
Equipment:
- 1 muffin pan, regular sized cavities
- Spoon or rubber spatula
- Mixing bowl
- Ice cream scoop #40
- Cupcake liners
- Cooling rack
Directions:
- Prepare the pans by lining them with muffin liners or greasing the bottom of the pan cavities.
- Preheat the oven to 400F.
- Mix the egg, milk and oil in a mixing bowl.
- Add the rest of the ingredients at the same time and mix by hand until combined, don’t overmix. It’s okay if the batter is a little lumpy.
- Put about 1 1/2 scoops of batter in each muffin liner. Distribute the batter evenly in each cup.
- Scatter chocolate chips on top of each muffin.
- Bake at 400F for 20 minutes.
- Remove the muffins from the pan and put them on a cooling rack. Serve warm, or store in a sealed container to serve later.
Tips for making the muffins.
For this version, I used the black cocoa from King Arthur Flour. It isn’t as sweet as regular cocoa, it’s what they use to make Oreos, so it gives you a subtle chocolate flavor. You can use more than I did if you want a stronger flavor, or substitute regular cocoa if you want them to be more like a milk chocolate.
For a recipe for chocolate sourdough bread using the black cocoa, click here.
Stir the ingredients up by hand, don’t use a mixer for this. Muffins don’t need to be beaten to death, just stir until everything’s incorporated. If the batter is a little lumpy that’s completely fine.
This is what my batter looked like, and it’s almost a little too smooth. They turned out fine texture-wise, but if you stir muffin batter too much they can develop too much gluten and end up tougher than you want.
I used a #40 ice cream scoop to put the batter into the cups to make sure I was doing it pretty evenly.
I put one scoop in each cup, then went back and divided up the rest of the batter to fill in the cup. I ended up using a smaller #70 scoop to divide the rest, since there wasn’t enough batter to do two larger scoops in each cup.
I was using larger chocolate chips, and I put 8 in each cup. You can add more into the batter if you want to, but I wanted to keep the sugar lower, so sprinkling them on top was fine.
Cooling and serving the muffins.
These baked for 20 minutes, and they were perfectly baked without me having to test them. The muffin liners made it easy to remove them from the pan, I just grabbed the ends of two corners and lifted them right out.
I put them on a cooling rack and let them cool off. These are a normal muffin serving size, so they’re smaller than the gigantic jumbo muffins that people sell now, but this is the actual serving of one muffin, and they’re fine for most people! At some point “jumbo” muffins started being referred to as just “muffins,” but that’s not a normal size for muffins.
These have about 200 calories in each one on average, and I checked to see how much the ones from Starbucks are. Theirs have 440 calories per muffin, but my guess is that’s an underestimate!
Anyway, the liners make it easy to remove the muffins from the pans, and they’re cute, too.
These muffins are a less-sweet (and more reasonable-sized) alternative to the jumbo muffins that have a lot more sugar and fat in them.