The (Olympics) Chocolate Muffin Bake Off

Your early access to the results 🥇

There is simply no task like sampling 9 different chocolate muffins in one day and trying to give a formal critique of each.

For me, a chocolate lover, this is akin to choosing a favorite child. The thing about chocolate muffins is that I feel they, more so than other muffins, are more often cake disguised in a muffin form. While a lemon poppyseed or banana nut muffin might err on the bready side, cocoa powder (plus a sufficient amount of fat, sugar and liquid) more often guarantees a tender, cake-like crumb.

This is a roundabout way of saying my worst fears sort of came true in this bake off*: most of the muffins tasted *fairly* similar (and delicious).

Why is this my worst dream? Because the point of the bake offs is to showcase an array of flavors, textures and techniques within the category of a single baked good that you can adopt to make your own.

On the plus side, this also shows that chocolate muffins are pretty adaptable and pretty delicious no matter what formula you choose to follow.

And backing up a step: in case you somehow missed the memo, the inspiration for this month’s bake offs came from the incredible coverage of the chocolate muffins from the Olympics cafeteria. Thank you to Henrik for inspiring this bake off which otherwise might have taken years to produce!

*every bake off, I live in fear that all the samples will taste the same

~behind the scenes~

The time: 4:17pm on Friday, August 16

The place: a sun-drenched Manhattan apartment with dozens of chocolate muffins lining every spare inch of surface area.

The scene: a lightly sweaty woman starts to halve the muffins with a large bread knife, setting them aside in a pile to be boxed. Her mind wanders as she slices muffin after muffin, marveling at how they all have such a deep, rich hue. So interesting how Dutch-process lends such an appealing color while natural cocoa typically—wait, where’s that recipe made with natural cocoa?

The color drains from her face as she realizes: she made a mistake. She’d automatically dumped Dutch-process cocoa into the sixth recipe she’d baked off instead of natural cocoa.

Her eyes flash to the clock. Just over an hour until pick up: in theory, enough time to bake off another double batch of muffins. She rapidly ticks through the recipe ingredients and fires off a text requesting 16 OZ OF SOUR CREAM AND 24 OZ OF CHOCOLATE CHIPS PLS SO SORRY!!!! to a friend coming to help box muffins.

And in the end: wam, just-baked pieces of muffins are thrown into the boxes just before tasters arrive for pick up and this episode of baker’s error was narrowly avoided!!

The Chocolate Muffin Bake Off Results

Below you’ll find a sneak peek at the chocolate bake off results (the full bake off post will be published later this week).

I don’t think I need to reiterate that each muffin was DELICIOUS and there are no losers in this (or any) bake off.

Links to each recipe are below!