Christmassy chocolate/coconut muffin with homemade ganache

Yes. I did it again...
But it is thattime of the year and I cannot ignore that sweets are a must:)
These delicious chocolate chip muffins with coconut are wonderful. Not too sweet, just sweet enough.

Let me tell you what you need to use to make these:

- 115 gr of butter
- 110 gr of white sugar
- 2 eggs
- 130 gr of plain flour
- 2 tsp bakingpowder
- a good amount of cocoa powder ( I used about 100 gr of so, I love cocoa)
- 125 gr of chocolate chips
- 50 gr of shredded coconut
- 1 tsp of vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp of salt
- 1/4 of a cup regular milk (but you can use almond milk, butter milk, rice milk, whatever you fancy)




How to make them?

- pre heat your oven to 180 °C (this is 356 °F)

- Mix your main dry ingredients in a bowl and give it a mix. So in a bowl go the flour, cocoa powder,salt, baking powder and the shredded coconut.

- In another bowl go the butter, sugar, vanilla extract and the eggs. First you make sure the butter and the sugar are creamy and then you add one by one the eggs. Finish it of with the milk. Note: you don't want to overmix your batter! Otherwise your muffins will be tough and dry...

- Add your chocolate chips and give it a quick stir.

- Now spoon your batter in muffin cases and place them in a oven for about 25 minutes



In the MEANTIME you can make your chocolate ganache. What? Ganache, just a fancy word for the mixture of chocolate and cream :) I made this recently for the first time and I am hooked. It is so easy and you can make any cake/cookie/muffin look very attractive and sjiek.

So, you need about 100 grams of chocolate (you can use best dark or milk chocolate) and 200 ml of cream. I used darkchocolate and I think its a good combination with the muffin because it is now not too sweet. But if you wish, make it sweet!

Cut your chocolate in small pieces using a sharp knife. Then heat your cream in a little pan on low heat. You only want to heat it up, you don't want it to boil! When it is warm, add your cream with the chocolate and just with a spoon you can stir it untill it becomes a nice smooth sauce. Then you want to pour it in a bowl and put it in your fridge for about an hour (it depends also on the bowl you are using). It will become harder and you can check every now and then to see if it has the texture you want. Note: if you forgot about your ganache and it has become too hard to work with, don't panic, just whip it in the microwave for about 20 sec or so and it is smooth again. After cooling down you can decorate your muffins with the ganache. I just used a spoon and I sprinkled some extra shredded coconut on top for a festive look (it is christmas, hello). And I used a little sugar decoration to finish it. You can buy these in any supermarket in the month of december.

And there you go. A cute little christmassy muffin.

Enjoy!
Happy holidays :)

xoxo Floortje