Blood Orange Chocolate Chip Muffins

As long as it’s citrus season (or, the tail end of it anyway), how about some blood orange muffins? I found the recipe on Mountain Mama Cooks via my friend Jen. It pairs blood orange with chocolate, always a winning combination. I really liked these muffins, and the Engineer said they had a great texture. I’m going to go ahead and recommend that you grease the muffin tin and forgo the liners – I don’t know if I’ve hit a bunch of odd recipes or if I’ve got a bad batch of paper liners, but the damn things keep tearing on me. Thank God the muffins were good enough to compensate! I’m also very happy that I have access to good citrus in Texas (as opposed to this), but if all you have are regular oranges, they would be really good, too (the batter won’t be pink once the muffins are done baking, anyway).



2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
½ cup sugar
1 egg
½ cup vegetable oil
zest of 2 blood oranges, separated
½ cup fresh blood orange juice (I used up both oranges for this)
¼ cup lactose-free whole milk
1 Tbsp. lactose-free Greek yogurt
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
½ cup dark chocolate chips
1 Tbsp. coarse sugar (turbinado is great here)

Heat oven to 375 °F. Grease a standard 12-cup muffin pan; set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.

In a large bowl, whisk sugar, egg, vegetable oil, zest from one orange, orange juice, milk, Greek yogurt and vanilla until well combined. Add flour mixture to egg/sugar mixture and stir just until combined. Fold in chocolate chips. Evenly divide the batter among the 12 muffin cups.

In a small bowl, combine the coarse sugar with the zest from other blood orange and rub the zest and sugar together with two fingers to release the oils in the zest and mix into the sugar. Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with orange zest and coarse sugar mixture. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean and muffins are cooked all the way through. Remove muffin pan from oven and place on wire rack to cool 5 minutes. Remove muffins from pan; cool completely on wire rack.