Cappuccino Muffins

I am a sucker for caffeine!! I can't imagine starting my morning without my HUGE mug of coffee and am quite fussy about my cuppa. I find the smell of coffee extremely irresistible and it finds its way into my cakes and desserts quite often. I had never baked muffins with butter or coffee earlier. When I saw this recipe on Deeba's blog, the combo sounded so damn, damn irresistible. You bet I visit PAB ever so frequently to drool over Deeba's utterly gorgeous cakes and bakes. I want to bake every cake on her blog and these Cappuccino Muffins called out to me real loud:-).

 I have mostly baked my cakes and cupcakes with oil and I am not all that confident when there is butter in a recipe. The 'creaming' to a fluffy stage scares me. This recipe thankfully did not call for creaming the butter. Thought it would be a good start for trying butter for baking. Here goes the recipe.

Ingredients:
2 cups self raising flour (I used 2 cups plain flour plus 3 teaspoons baking powder)
3/4 cup vanilla caster sugar (or plain caster sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract)
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons instant coffee powder
1/2 cup butter
1 egg
1 small bag chocolate chips (100g)
Method:
Preheat the oven onto 375º F / 180ºC.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan and leave to cool. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour and sugar.
Crack the egg into a medium sized bowl and add the milk and coffee granules and stir until the coffee is dissolved. Pour this coffee mixture onto the flour/sugar and add the melted butter.
Stir until just combined. Fold in the chocolate chips. Fill the muffin cases with the mixture, do not over-fill, you want the cases to be about 2/3 full.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until springy to the touch. Cool in the tin for about 5 minutes before putting the muffins onto a wire rack to cool.

I had only about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips, so I also used 1/4 cup chopped white chocolate. I baked a small batch of muffins they tasted wonderful, fresh out of the oven. I did not make any topping for the muffins. By the time I pre-heated the oven and measured out all the ingredients there was a power cut, and power played hide and seek with me for quite some time!! Thankfully I had not yet mixed the ingredients.

By the time the first batch of muffins went into the oven, it was quite late and I did not want to take any more chances baking more batches. So the rest of the batter went into a loaf tin. The cake in the loaf did not taste as good or light as the muffins. Am not sure if I took the loaf out a few minutes too soon or generally a muffin recipe is not really suited for cakes.  Have to find an excuse to bake the delicious muffins again to figure this out:-)) In the meantime, tips on baking with butter and muffin science most welcome!!

This post is also my entry to Champa's Bake Off event.