Store bought muffins always look twice the size of homemade muffins, with ballooning tops of crusty goodness. Why is that?
I figured out the deep dark secret they’re not telling you.
How does one get muffins twice the size?
Use twice the batter.
No really, I’m serious.
The crunchy part does have to do with the batter, but that big impressive top? You just don’t have enough batter in the muffin tin. Instead of filling tins 3/4 the way full, fill it more like this:
Fill it like you’re mimicking the size muffins usually are when they come out of the oven. By doing this, they will have huge, epically indulgent sized muffin tops.
They will merge together a little as a result of this muffin top party, but a simple butter knife will fix that. Also, make sure you spray the top of your pan, even if you use liners. The mufin top overflow can stick to your pan, which causes you to pull the top off without the rest of the muffin. I learned this the hard way. It’s cool though if you make my mistake, just do what I do. Eat it before anyone notices. :)
Don’t just take my batter doubling tip, take the recipe below too! Because it’s one thing to have big muffin tops and it’s a whole other to have CRUNCHY muffin tops. I sprinkled a little raw sugar on top, but it’s not even needed to keep these babies crunchy.
And the soft, fluffy, chocolatey stump ain’t nothing to scoff at either. I may be a muffin top gal, but no one else gets to eat my stump!
Try it, love it, report back if you have similar successes!
Crunchy-Top Chocolate Chip Muffins
Adapted from Crumbs and Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 egg
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup oil
- 1/3 cup milk or buttermilk
- 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chunks
- raw sugar (optional)
Directions
- Preheat oven to 400F. Lightly spray around the tops of 6 cups of a standard muffin tin with baking or oil spray. Line them with six paper liners or spray the cups as well.
- Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.
- Whisk the egg and sugar until pale and fluffy, a.k.a the “ribbon stage” (When the egg/sugar mixture drips in thick ribbons off the whisk). Pour in the oil and milk/buttermilk and whisk to combine.
- Stir the egg mixture into the flour mixture with a rubber spatula until just combined. Mix in the chocolate chunks. The batter should be thick and lumpy.
- Divide the batter among the paper liners such that they are overfilled in a dome as shown above. Sprinkle with raw sugar if desired. Let batter sit in pan for 5 minutes.
- Bake in preheated oven for about 15-20 minutes, or until a tester inserted into into the center of a muffin comes out clean (Watch out, a wet tester may just be due to melted chocolate!). Let cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then finish cooling on a wire rack. (Or eat warm after the first 10 minutes!)
I just want to dive into my screen right now and eat one of those gorgeous muffins. Love it! Definitely giving these a try.
OMG! these look so-so good, I love your muffin tops, they look irresistible. I want to make them right now.
Thanks for sharing, and have a great day!
I just made these and they are fantastic! They’re so crunchy (on top and on the bottom) and fluffy on the inside. I doubled the recipe but kept the same quantity of choc chip. It didn’t need any more choc chips. I added a little extra baking powder and oiled the muffin tin. Great recipe. Thanks :)
I do have a tendency to go overboard with chocolate in as many of my applications as possible! ;)
Hey, I haven’t tried these yet, but I want to. Only problem is… I tried following some other ladies chocolate chip recipe, and the muffins came out hard on top and tasted bland.
Ingredients i remember using were:
2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 cup sugar , Olive Oil (1/3 cup) , 1 egg, 1/2 cup milk,
I mixed olive oil with the milk, and then the egg (like she told me to) and then I mixed it into the flour and baking soda and sugar and chocolate and kept mixing, i even noticed that the batter was a bit dry….
put them in, and they looked like porcupines on the top and were hard and bland and tasteless…
which was weird , because I followed another recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins, which had no milk (only butter) and no olive oil or any type of oil . and it turned out awesome.
Anyways, any idea where i screwed up, and what is the warranty that your muffin recipe will work??????
Thanks!
Also, I tried your ingredients, but it only was enough for 9 of the muffin slots. Hmmm…. any suggestions on what I should double to get 12 slots or even 24 ?
Thanks!
Hi Mohamed
So your issues sound like they’re about ratios of wet to dry ingredients and not necessarily about using butter vs. oil vs. milk. These three products will have different results on flavour and texture, but ultimately it’s about how much these products vs. dry ingredients (like flour) you use. So the fact that the second recipe just used butter wasn’t an issue because it also had bananas to help with the amount of wet ingredients in the mix.
I can’t guarantee anything with the muffin recipe as there’s lots of difference that can happen between your kitchen and mine (ovens heat at different temperatures, dry vs. moist climates, amount of mixing of the batter) I can only share what my personal experience was, and help you with yours if you need it. :)
The recipe is actually for only SIX muffins, not even 9 because of the nature of overloading the muffin tin for a large muffin-top. If you want more muffins, a simple doubling of the entire recipe while following the same steps should work fine.
I baked this lovely creatures this morning! I was out of milk so I replaced cream instead with little bit of mashed banana. It ended up baking for 30~35 minutes because my batter was cookie dough-like due to my substitution, but over all, they were very crunch-soft-at the same time. Very much like Einstein bro bagels’s streusel cupcake! Thanks for sharing the recipe! yumm
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This recipe is the single most successful, perfect, adaptable, delicious recipe I’ve ever used, thank you soon much for posting it!
*sooo
These tasted great and came out fine except that the underneath part of the tops were all burned. I did spray the pans with spray. Did I just leave them in too long? I did check with a toothpick and the middle wasn’t done so I just left them for 2 more minutes.