Recipe rescue
My sister gave me an excellent thing for Christmas. It was another vegan air fryer cookery book; but this one is British, which means I don't have to go through converting everything into metric weights. Moreover, looking at it, I think most of the recipes have a fighting chance of actually working first time. I haven't yet tried anything from the American book that has.
The new book has a recipe for chocolate brownies. I was very keen to plunge straight into that, for one thing because I really like brownies, and for another because you can convert them to gluten-free and get equally good results (generally, the denser something is meant to be, the better a gluten-free version will work), and that means it's another possible thing to bring to church lunches. However, I'd already bought courgettes so that I could try the muffin recipe from the American book, so that was what I made instead.
Now, generally, I'm all in favour of putting vegetables into cakes. It's very good for keeping them moist. I once had a chocolate cake with beetroot in it; now beetroot is one of the very few vegetables I don't like, but I can tell you it did absolute wonders for that chocolate cake. It was one of the best cakes I've ever had. So courgettes in chocolate muffins sounded like an excellent idea. (Obviously the book called them zucchini, but we know what they mean.) I was feeling a little bit off colour the day I first made them, so I grated the courgettes, went and sat down for a bit, then got up and did the rest; I mention this merely for completeness, as I don't think it'll have made any difference. The courgettes were sitting around in the kitchen for no more than a couple of hours, so they won't have dried out appreciably.
Normally, I'll do the recipe exactly as written the first time, but in this case I had to make two changes. The first was that you were not going to taste a quarter of a teaspoonful of cinnamon in all that lot, so I upped it to a teaspoonful; and the second was that the original recipe didn't contain any liquid, other than the oil and about a teaspoonful of other stuff (and maybe you could count the chia mixture, but by the time the seeds have soaked for a while it's not really very liquidy). Consequently, when I tried to follow the recipe, I ended up with a stiff dough rather than a cake batter, so I had to add some almond milk. The resulting quantity was supposed to make 12 muffins (a friend did wonder if they meant mini muffins, and she had a good point, but the recipe didn't specify that). I got 8, and even then they were pretty titchy. They did have a good texture - the courgette was doing its job admirably, as they were very moist - but they weren't anywhere near sweet enough, and, yes, in fact there is such a thing as too much chocolate. They were a very intense dark chocolate hit, almost to the point of being bitter. I don't know about anyone else, but that is not what I want from a muffin.
So for the next attempt, I added some liquid, drastically reduced the amount of cocoa powder, upped the sugar, and put the batter into 6 muffin cups. (I have those ones from Lakeland Limited that look like little flower pots. The great advantage of these is that they're tall and narrow compared to most other muffin cups, so you can easily get six of them into quite a small air fryer basket.) I thought they'd just need a couple more minutes, given that there was more batter in each cup; but air fryers don't appear to work linearly. They weren't done in the time, so I gave them a few more minutes... and then a few more... and a few more... I kept thinking they were going to be done, and they weren't. And with all those interruptions, unfortunately they sank pretty badly, having risen well at first. I think that if they just stay in the air fryer the whole time they should be fine and stay properly risen, but I still need to make one more batch just to be certain of that. In the meantime, they're fine in all other respects. They're still very moist, they're sweet enough without being too sweet, and the chocolate level is a happy normal. And they're a decent size!
Anyway, I'm now confident enough to put the tweaked version of the recipe into my book, so without further ado, here it is.
Chocolate and Courgette Muffins
1 tbsp (15 ml) chia seed
45 ml water
80 g plain wholemeal flour
10 g cocoa powder
1/4 tsp bicarb
pinch of salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
150 g soft dark brown sugar
100 ml plant milk
60 ml rapeseed oil
2.5 ml pure vanilla extract
about 1/2 tsp lemon juice
120 g grated courgettes
90 g dark chocolate chips
Mix the chia seed and water, and allow to stand for 10 - 15 minutes until the mixture thickens, stirring occasionally to mix in any floating seeds.
Mix the flour, cocoa powder, bicarb, salt, and cinnamon. Add the sugar, oil, plant milk, vanilla, lemon juice, and chia mixture. Mix well, then fold in the courgettes and chocolate chips.
Preheat the air fryer to 130 C for 5 minutes. Transfer the batter to 6 silicone muffin cups. Bake for 35 - 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean from the centre of a muffin.
Serve warm or cold.
I plan to do the brownies next; but I have a feeling those aren't going to need rescuing. Though they will be slightly odd brownies, as due to the exigencies of my air fryer I'm going to need to do them in a circular container rather than the traditional square or rectangular baking tray, so they're likely to end up being wedges, as when you slice a round cake. But I'm sure they'll still taste fine, and, after all, who says a brownie has to be a rectangle?
