It's Spring in the Southern Hemisphere so I'm craving ice cream and light treats. However, most of my Instagram friends are from the Northern Hemisphere so my feed is currently bombarded with hearty and warm sweet breads, soups and comfort food! To meet half way, I decided to make these chocolate and peanut butter muffins. They are wholesome and perfect heated up (perfect for Northerners) but no one can say no to the winning combo of chocolate and peanut butter (I'm looking at you Aussies and anyone in the Southern Hemisphere)!
These muffins are a simplified version of Snickers... minus the nougat but with the fluffiness of cake. I'm not complaining! These muffins are, of course, vegan but I made them refined sugar free because coconut sugar gives chocolate cake a wonderfully caramel taste.
These treats are also gluten free, as I realise many of my readers are intolerant or sensitive to it. Gluten-free baking can be tricky as the baked goods are often gritty and chewy. However, I've experimented with different types of flours in my cake business and came up with a good combo which involves part white rice flour and part pre-made gluten-free flour blend. The rice flour gives the muffin a light fluffiness which you can see in the picture above. The gluten-free flour blend has gums in it which helps bind all of the ingredients.
If you can eat gluten, this recipe would work well with plain wheat flour. If you only have self-raising flour on hand, halve the amount of baking powder you use in your batter. At the end of the day, nothing can replace the texture of normal gluten flour... in my opinion at least!
The first ingredient in the recipe is coconut sugar so it may initially sound like that there's a lot of sugar in the muffins. However, when you add up all of the flours, cocoa powder and other ingredients, the muffins aren't overly sweet at all! Feel free to adjust the amount of sugar in the recipe - the less you put, the more fudgy and dense the muffins will be. Just remember to taste test your batter before you bake them. Unlike conventional muffin batters which have eggs, there are only plant-based ingredients in this recipe so there is minimal risk of getting salmonella or sick from taste testing it!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy making this recipe!
If you try this recipe, I would love to hear about it! Comment below and rate it as it would really help us and other readers! If you post it on social media, tag @rainbownourishments and #rainbownourishments.
Chocolate peanut butter muffins (vegan)
Ingredients
Dry ingredients
- 1 ½ cup (250g) coconut sugar
- 1 cup (155g) white rice flour
- ½ cup (85g) gluten-free flour blend
- ½ cup (40g) cocoa or raw cacao powder
- 2 tsp (10g) baking powder
Wet ingredients
- 1 cup (250mL) plant-based milk, such as almond, soy or coconut
- ½ cup (125mL) water
- ½ cup (125mL) light-tasting vegetable oil, such as sunflower or rapeseed
- ¼ cup vegan chocolate, melted
Peanut butter swirl
- ½ cup (180g) smooth or crunchy peanut butter
- ¼ cup (50mL) plant-based milk, such as almond, soy or coconut
- 1 tbs (10g) coconut sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 160C.
- Sift all of the dry ingredients into a large bowl.
- Add the wet ingredients to the bowl and mix until combined.
- In a separate bowl, combine all of the peanut butter swirl ingredients until thoroughly combined. Add half of the mixture into the muffin batter and fold in but don't completely mix in.
- Scoop and distribute the muffin batter into 12 lined muffin moulds. Spoon remaining peanut butter mixture on top of muffins. Use a blunt knife to roughly swirl the peanut butter into the top of the muffins.
- Bake muffins in the oven for 25-28 minutes or until a skewer can be inserted into a muffin and it comes out clean.
- Rest muffins for 5 minutes and enjoy! Muffins can be kept at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 3 days. Alternatively, freeze the muffins in an airtight container for up to a month.
As someone who is a rather obsessed with muffins, I can confirm these are amazing. I used ABC butter as my peanut butter was out of date by over a year so...the other nut butter worked just fine! I love that these muffins are not sickly sweet, and I’m also not a big chocolate person, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed them. So nice warmed up with a bit of nuttelex ? xx
It was simply divine! so moist and scrumptious. I thoroughly enjoyed the richness of it. The best thing about it is that just one muffin satisfies my cravings 🙂
Forgot to ask can you use organic soft brown sugar instead of coconut sugar?
Yes you can! Brown sugar has a little more moisture than coconut sugar so you may need to remove some of the liquid 🙂
Can you make these with spelt flour and omit the rice flour and gluten free flour? Thanks
Yes! Substitute both flours for 1 1/2 cups spelt flour. Spelt absorbs liquid a little differently from rice and gluten free flour so you may need to add or remove a little liquid - the batter should be the consistency of normal cake batter.
Hi there,
This recipe looks lovely and I'd like to try it this weekend. If I use 'regular' aka gluten flour, do I just combine the two flour amounts in the recipe? So 1.5 cups white / whole wheat flour?
Appreciate your help (ps. you must get so tired of answering newbie bakers questions that probably seem obvious to you, so thank you for your patience - I notice how nice you are answering the same questions over and over on other recipes).
Thanks D
Hey, yes feel free to use that amount of regular/wheat flour! If you do, bake the muffins at 180C. The recipe states 160C but that's just because I used almond flour. Enjoy!