Raise your hand if you’re a fan of dark chocolate! These deliciously indulgent chocolate muffins with a soft center are just for you! 😊

Today, the Light and Tasty column features a special episode dedicated to the leap year, this 2024 with an extra day. 😀

Surely, you’re all familiar with that old saying our grandparents told us as children: leap year, dreadful year (and let’s keep our fingers crossed, because we really don’t need any dreadful things! 😏🤞🤘🌶🐞🍀).

Perhaps this saying is a bit outdated for new generations, but we’ve dusted it off today as an excuse to offer you some mood-lifting recipes. 😁 And when deciding on my recipe, I thought there’s nothing better than chocolate to bring a bit of cheer, don’t you agree?

Moreover, these chocolate muffins with a soft center were picked from my daughter’s recipes, the ones she used to delight us with (yes, because they were almost always desserts) when university was still a distant thought and my little girl was still with us every day. When I saw these photos again… ahhhh, a mother’s soft heart! More than chocolate! 💛 So a breeze of cheer is absolutely needed here!

It’s a recipe taken from an old book, the first book by Benedetta Parodi, from when she hosted Cotto e Mangiato on Italia1, a now vintage book that proved perfect for a teenager tackling (what were at the time) her first recipes.

Flavia repeated it three times within a few days, one of which was for a New Year’s Eve. Ahhh what lovely memories!!

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And for more mood-lifting recipes… what do you think of these?

Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Economical
Preparation time: 10 Minutes
Portions: 6-7
Cooking methods: Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: All Seasons

Ingredients

1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
7 tbsp butter
3.5 oz dark chocolate
2 eggs

Tools

Mold for 6 muffins
Bowl
Saucepan

Steps

Melt the chocolate with the butter over low heat in a saucepan.
Briefly beat the eggs with the sugar in a bowl, there’s no need to whip them.
Add the flour to the eggs, preferably sifted, and mix.
Combine the melted chocolate and mix well.
Pour everything into the muffin mold, dividing it evenly into the compartments.
The mixture is enough for 6 or 7 medium-sized muffins.
Bake for 10 minutes in an oven at 392°F.
Take them out when small cracks form on the muffin surface.
👉 Once cracks form, remove them immediately to keep the inside soft.
👉👉 Just as their name suggests, these are chocolate muffins with a soft center, not with a molten, melted, or liquid center. The interior is moist, soft, and chocolaty as Flavia’s hand shows us in the following photo. The photo was very dark and I tried to lighten it as much as possible, but the soft center is clearly visible. 😊
And here, in the foreground, you can see the steam from the opened warm muffin. Indeed, to fully enjoy the softness of the chocolate heart, it’s best to eat these muffins while they’re still warm 😋 (but I also like them the next day, if there are any left 🤭).