Erin Fox
After one too many Ferrero Rocher and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges at Christmas, I came up with this recipe for chocolate orange and hazelnut muffins. When I first learned how to bake, any muffin recipe I looked at always seemed to give the option of using nuts or chocolate chips. As a huge fan of both, I decided to include my favourite nut in this muffin recipe. Omit the orange zest for plainer muffins if you prefer.
You can also make these with wholemeal flour for a breakfast muffin. Pour all of the batter into a lined loaf tin and bake for 35 minutes until ready.
Toasting the nuts before using them will release their aromas and make a more flavoursome bake. Roast them or toast the nuts, whichever method you like best.
This recipe makes 12 muffins.
Ingredients
275g / 10oz plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
75g / 3oz unsalted butter at room temperature
125g / 4oz golden caster sugar
zest of 1 large orange
250ml good quality natural yogurt
75g / 3oz chopped hazelnuts
75g / 3oz 70% dark chocolate chopped
2 eggs
pinch of salt
Preheat oven to 200 degrees/180 degrees for fan oven. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with muffin wrappers.
Method
Toast the hazelnuts in a pan over a medium high heat for about a minute. Toss them around the pan so that they don’t burn. Once they have cooled, roughly chop them with a knife and leave aside for later.
For a quicker method, place the cooled toasted hazelnuts into a food processor. Roughly break the chocolate up with your hands and add this to the food processor with the hazelnuts. Blitz until everything is roughly chopped. Don’t blitz for too long otherwise the nuts will become too oily.
Sift the flour with the baking powder and the salt into a bowl. Beat the butter with the orange zest and sugar together in a separate bowl.
Measure the yogurt in a jug and mix in the eggs. Pour this into the sugar and butter mixture, and mix together. Fold in the flour and baking powder, and finally the hazelnuts and chocolate chips.
Divide the batter between the muffins cases and bake in the oven on the middle shelf for 20 minutes until golden on top and when a skewer emerges clean.
If you like a freshly baked warm muffin, allow them to cool in the muffin tin for 10 minutes before tucking in.