Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Muffins

Phew! First of all, thank you everyone for the many many comments on my First Anniversary post. I was honestly overwhelmed and elated that so many people liked the madness that spilled onto that post. Sometimes my craziness and tendency to be dramatic have to be reigned in... I think I might genuinely scare people off otherwise :D So after the Film Food post, I wanted to blog about something that matches up to it, if not in terms of zaniness then sheer scrumptious-ness at least! So I decided to bake some muffins for the first time. My friend SM gifted me a Muffin Tray long ago along with assorted baking goodies and equipment. But it has taken me months to finally get around to baking some muffins in the tray. One of the main reasons was that I didn't have muffin tray liners. In fact I still don't have any :( It's just that there is no store near my house that stocks any baking paraphernalia and I'm too lazy to travel 30km to Crawford Market to buy stuff. So these Chocolate Chip Muffins finally got made without liners and were none the worse for it :)


This recipe is from a vaguely remembered and hastily jotted down episode of Nigella Lawson's 'Feast' I think. I tried to look it up on the net but found various versions of it. So I just made my own changes to it and came up with a pretty good version myself! I was just so happy that the muffins actually looked like muffins that I did a little jig on my own in the kitchen :D
Ingredients:

• Plain/All-purpose flour - 1/2 cup
• Wholewheat Flour (Atta) - 1 and 1/4 cup (If your not too hung up on calories or weight, just go with 250gms of plain flour/maida)
• Powdered Sugar/Castor Sugar - 3/4 cup (I used Brown Sugar)
  
• Baking powder - 2 tsp
  
• Baking soda - 1/2 tsp
  
• Cocoa powder - 2 tbsp
  
• Dark chocolate chips - 1/2 cup
  
• Milk - 1 cup
  
• Melted butter or Vegetable Oil - 1/3 cup (about 100ml)
  
• Egg - 1
  
• Vanilla extract - 1 tsp
  

Sieve together the plain flour, baking powder and baking soda. Now add the cocoa powder, castor sugar and chocolate chips. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 200 degree C and either line the muffin tray with paper liners, or do what I did and just grease the muffin tray.

In a large glass bowl, whisk together the milk, vegetable oil/butter, the egg and vanilla extract. Add the dry flour mixture to this and combine till you have a nice runny muffin mix. Do not over combine or else the chocolate chips will turn all gooey and melt. Even if you see a few lumps of flour its fine and will only add to the texture.

Now spoon the mixture into the muffin cases filling each muffin mould up to the 3/4th mark.
Bake for 25 minutes or till a toothpick comes out clean.

The muffins were really, really perfect! I wouldn't change a thing and I'm just dying to bake another batch again. Maybe some apple-cinnamon, or some strawberry-banana ones next? What say?