Black Forest Muffins

These delicious one bowl black forest muffins are a quick and easy bake to make, packed full of chocolate chunks, cherries, and a cherry jam. They are gooey, super chocolatey, and can be ready to eat within the hour.

Notes from The Patisserie

These DELIGHTFUL muffins are my new favourite bake – they have an incredible gooey texture, whilst having the wonderful denser nature of a muffin, whilst packed with chunks of cherry and chocolate throughout… what more could you want?!

These delicious black forest muffins are made super easily into one bowl, with just a spoon or spatula. The oil based of the recipe makes it really easy to mix together no matter your skill. Yes, I would say that Black Forest is a flavour format of chocolate + cherry together, but often people would say you need some cream in there too.

So.. top tip: serve these warm, with a dollop of lightly whipped cream. It makes a dreamy dessert that feels different from the norm, and it proves successful every time I do it.

What is the difference between a cupcake and a muffin?

Where terminology for baking can vary all over the world, I am not surprised that sometimes wires get crossed. For example, what we call a flapjack in the UK, is a pancake in America. The variety can even come down to what people across the UK call a bread roll (cob/bun/bap/barm etc).

I find, often, cupcakes and muffins have the same problems. I have requests for recipes all of the time, but the recipe may already exist, but if someone calls a cupcake a muffin, it won’t necessarily come up in their search results.

For me, a cupcake is smaller than a muffin, lighter in texture and more airy, and typically with a frosting such as buttercream or ganache on top, often coloured to at theme or flavour such as my lemon drizzle cupcakes, or even my kinder bueno cupcakes. They are great for a party, wedding, bake sale etc

A muffin, is a larger, slightly denser as they are usually packed full of different ingredients such as fruits, or chocolate, such as my white chocolate and raspberry muffins, or my oreo muffins.

What makes it more confusing, is the cases you can buy to make cupcakes or muffins in, often cross over. Generally, for my muffins, I like to use tulip cases because they help with the growth and size of the muffin batter, and use the perforated smaller cases for cupcakes.

Ingredients notes and tips

The liquid ingredients

Full recipe can be found in the recipe card below:

The liquid part of a bake is always important, as this is what you usually emulsify together first. The liquid part of the recipe helps to hydrate the flour, and combine the structural ingredients together – as well as creating the moisture you want.

• Oil – I would always usually recommend using vegetable oil or sunflower oil as they are flavourless – you can use an olive oil, but you would want to use a lighter one so that you don’t have the intense flavour
• Eggs – I always use medium eggs in my baking for consistency, but you could use two large as well.
• Flavouring – I love the addition of vanilla extract as I find it levels up the bake, but it is optional, or interchangeable for a different flavour such as almond, coffee, or even a citrus.
• Buttermilk – Buttermilk is a wonderful ingredient that brings so much moisture to a bake. You can buy it, make it yourself, or you can swap this to natural yoghurt or soured cream.

The dry ingredients

• Sugar – As a bit of a habit these days, I use light brown soft sugar in nearly all of my chocolate bakes because I adore the natural caramel flavour it creates, but you can swap it to granulated sugar, caster sugar, or golden caster sugar.
• Flour – it’s important to use a plain/all purpose flour, not self raising. You want to control the raising agent yourself
• Cocoa – I use a strong 100% cocoa powder for an intense chocolate flavour – I would recommend avoiding using a hot chocolate powder as I find these are too sweet and lack flavour
• Raising agent – a small amount of baking powder to create the correct rise in a muffin – not changeable for bicarbonate of soda.
• Salt – I like to add in sea salt as I think it combats the sweetness of the sugar, as well as bringing out the flavour of the chocolate and fruit.

Making this Black Forest themed

Of course, the main show and feature of the recipe – what makes this Black Forest themed.

• Chocolate – I use dark chocolate, as I believe that is what belongs in Black Forest. I use a bar of chocolate, and chop it up into chunks as I find it works wonderfully in these muffins – you can swap to chocolate chips. You can also change to milk or white chocolate if you prefer that instead.
• Cherries – I used fresh cherries – de-stoning them first, and then chopping them up. I usually do it into quarters or more, but I do just roughly chop. Frozen cherries may work, but they would be harder to chop, and may therefore then sink.
• Cherry jam – an optional filling of the muffin – a cherry jam or conserve. I pipe this into each muffin, just before baking.

How to make the best muffins possible

The best start to any recipe is to make sure you have read and checked the ingredients you have are correct, measured correctly, and that you have read through the method at least once. I find this best no matter what I make, as it’s incredibly easy to make mistakes.

A recipe like this is really easy to mix together – whisking together the liquids first, and then stirring through the dry ingredients. Once you have added the dry ingredients, you need to make sure you act quickly and not let the batter sit too long as it can cause a problem with the bake.

Split evenly between the 12 tulip cases – I use a cookie scoop to make this easier – and then pipe in the jam if you want to use it. When they come out of the oven, the jam may have created little craters, but that is fine. This is when I add decoration of a chocolate of chocolate and a fresh cherry, and the warmth of the muffin/stickiness of the jam will help set these in place.

FAQs

Storage and freezing

These cupcakes are so delicious when warm and fresh out of the oven, they are definitely best on the day of baking. However, they do last for 3-4+ days, at room temperature. The fridge may dry them out.

These muffins can freeze for 3+ months – I would thaw them either in the fridge overnight, or on the side for a couple of hours.