Chocolate and Raspberry Muffins

One of my favourite deli shops in Edinburgh, Peckham's, is still stocking some gorgeous Scottish raspberries from Bruce's of Balmyle. Apparently Scotland is rather good in growing raspberries - the fruit seams to agree with the Scottish weather - and who am I to argue. (The ones in my mum's garden come close though, and I miss the pretty yellow variety she grows). I reckon I've bought a box of those raspberries every other day, usually popping them into my mouth when watching news or reading. They're so tasty and full of flavour that it'd be pity to cook them.

Still, I used these raspberries in Cranachan few weeks ago, though this wasn't really 'cooking' the raspberries. This time I decided to make a batch of chocolate and raspberry muffins, as I had got a few requests for this from visitors to my Estonian language website and I thought to try them out.

Eventually I found and followed a recipe from Cadbury's website pretty much to the letter, although I slightly reduced the amount of cocoa (I reckoned my Green & Black's organic cocoa powder may be stronger than Cadbury Bournville Cocoa). I'm not too keen on chocolate muffins in general, so I was trying to be on the safe side.

Cadbury's Chocolate Raspberry Muffins

125 grams butter, softened
250 ml caster sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
375 ml self-raising flour
75 ml cocoa powder
0.5 tsp bicarbonate soda
250 ml milk
150 grams fresh or frozen raspberries

Preheat oven to conventional or 170ºC fan forced.
Combine butter, sugar and eggs in a bowl and mix until light and creamy.
Sift flour, cocoa, and bicarbonate soda. Add to creamed mixture with milk. Mix thoroughly until the mixture is smooth.
Spoon into greased 12-hole muffin pan.
Top all muffins with raspberries and bake at 190ºC for 20 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.
Cool and dust with icing/confectioner's sugar before serving.

The recipe was easy and muffins lovely. Although the recipe said that it would yield 12 muffins (using 1/3 cup muffin pan), then I ended up with 12 regular and 18 mini muffins. I used 3 raspberries to decorate the regular muffins and 1 to decorate mini muffins. I liked the way how the raspberries 'drowned' in the batter during baking.

And I enjoyed the end result - moist raspberry centre, not too chocolatey (I'm a self-confessed chocoholic, but I do _not_ like chocolate or cocoa in my muffins curiously). The raspberries nicely balanced the cocoa flavour. Even my Turkish flatmate, who dislikes chocolate muffins AND raspberries (apparently the latter isn't really to the Mediterranean taste buds), had one:)

Just wondering if it's correct to call these 'chocolate and raspberry muffins' if they don't contain any chocolate. Should it be 'cocoa and raspberry muffins' instead?

Kakao-vaarikamuffinite retsept