I’m Just Here for the Food: Olympic Chocolate Muffins

Most of us will never know the thrill of competing as an Olympic athlete, but what if you could eat like one? I don’t mean those bazillion calorie meals swimmers consume before a major race. I’m talking about the Olympic chocolate muffins.

For those of you who don’t know about these muffins because you watched the Olympics for the actual sporty stuff, allow me to enlighten you. During his stay in the Olympic Village, Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen made a dozen TikTok videos featuring some truly amazing-looking muffins, garnering over 10 million views. Other athletes made similar videos, launching a worldwide quest for the recipe for these muffins.

Breakfast of Champions

The Olympic chocolate muffins were identified by Kelin Carolyn Zhang as the Maxi Muffin Chocolat Intense from the French company Coup De Pates. With a gorgeous crown, a delicate crumb, a rich ganache center, and tons of chocolate chunks, these muffins look decadent and delicious.

While you can order these muffins online, that just wouldn’t be the Chef’s Corner Store way. Instead, I searched for bakers who had attempted to recreate the recipes based solely on photos and videos. I found Hetal Vasavada, who featured a recipe for these muffins on her blog Milk & Cardamom. With a published cookbook of the same name and recipes featured in The New York Times, Bon Appetit and Food & Wine, I felt confident in her ability to accurately reproduce this viral sensation.

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Round One: A Swing and a Miss

While the recipe for these decadent muffins is a bit more involved than typical breakfast muffins, they don’t require any special equipment beyond a hand mixer or stand mixer and a standard 12-cup muffin pan. I used store-bought muffin liners, but I love the look of homemade tulip style liners, especially for muffins as special as these.

When you’ve been baking for a while, you can often tell by the batter when a recipe isn’t going to yield the expected results. These muffins were loaded with chocolate flavor, thanks to cocoa powder, melted chocolate and chocolate chunks. However, the texture was closer to a brownie and not quite as delicate as what I had envisioned. Fortunately, everyone at the office was happy to take these muffins off my hands without complaint.

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Round Two: Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together

My goal for this little muffin experiment was to bake a muffin so delicious and decadent I’d want to proclaim my love for it in a series of TikTok videos (even though I deleted my own TikTok account about 20 minutes after creating it). I’d missed the mark with the first recipe, so I went back to the drawing board.

My inbox was filled with talk of chocolate muffins from over a dozen food publications. Naturally, King Arthur Baking was in on the action. They recommended simply adding ganache to their chocolate breakfast muffins. I wondered, could it really be this simple?

The King Arthur Baking recipe is written by PJ Hamel, and I have had success with a few of her recipes. I took what I’d learned from Hetal’s recipe and combined it with PJ’s recipe to craft this hybrid recipe.

Olympic Chocolate Muffins Recipe

Muffin Ingredients

• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/3 cup black cocoa powder
• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon espresso powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ¾ teaspoon sea salt
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 ¼ cup light brown sugar, packed
• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• ¾ cups milk
• One 3.5 ounce chocolate bar, roughly chopped

Ganache Ingredients

• ½ cup heavy whipping cream
• 2/3 cup chopped chocolate
• ¼ teaspoon sea salt

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F and insert liners in a standard muffin pan.
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the cocoa, flour, baking powder, espresso powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
3. In a medium mixing bowl, cream the butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and mix until combined. Mix in the milk and vanilla.
4. Measure 1 tablespoon from the dry ingredients and combine it with the chopped chocolate. Set aside.
5. Add the creamed butter mixture to the dry ingredients and mix just until combined.
6. Fold in the chopped chocolate mixture.
7. Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin pan. The liners will be heaped full of batter. The muffins will dome up while baking.
8. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick or cake tester inserted in the muffin comes out clean.
9. While the muffins cool, use a knife or piping tip to punch a hole in the center of the muffin.
10. Prepare the ganache. Add cream, chocolate and salt to a sauce pan and heat on low. Stir until melted and smooth.
11. Pour the ganache into the hole in each muffin. The slightly warm muffins will soak up the ganache, so you may need to add ganache more than once. Serve immediately or store at room temperature for up to three days.

I did not re-download TikTok and create muffin videos, but a coworker did have to let me know that I had chocolate on my face after the taste test, so I felt a definite kinship with Christiansen and his love of Olympic chocolate muffins.