Trystan's Black Muffins

7:32AM Sunday morning

Trystan: "I want muffins."
Me: "Muffins? What kind of muffins?"
Trystan: "Black muffins. I want to stir."

Trystan's Black Muffins

Ingredients
Dry:

1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hersheys Special Dark Cocoa)
1/2 cup sugar
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Wet:
3/4 cup rolled oats*
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
1 Tbsp dry instant coffee**
1 tsp vanilla extract

*No, this isn't a typo. Read on :)
** This much coffee won't make the muffins taste like mocha, but it will make the chocolate flavor stand out more. You could omit this if you prefer.



Directions

1. (Mommy's job) Preheat oven to 400.
   
2. (Trystan's job) Line muffin pan with muffin cups. We made 24 mini-muffins, but a 12-cup pan should also work (Same temperature, longer bake time). FYI, Trystan chose the pink-hearted muffin cup liners over the plain white that I was reaching for.
   
3. (Trystan's job) Combine all ingredients listed under "wet" above.
   
   • Small children love to stir. I keep small whisks on hand just for this purpose.
     
   • Yes, the wet ingredients list includes the oatmeal. We keep the old-fashioned oats on hand, and I've found that soaking them in wet ingredients before baking makes them less crunchy in the finished product.
     
   • And I add the instant coffee to the wet ingredients because my preferred brand is kind of clumpy and works better dissolved
     
   
   
4. (Mommy's job) Combine all ingredients listed under "dry" above. I do the dry ingredients to keep flour from flying all over my kitchen.
   
5. (Trystan's job) Add wet ingredients to dry, and stir "just until moistened". This batter mixed up almost as thick as cookie dough, and I had to take over the stirring to make sure it got combined without spilling. The thick batter was mostly due to the cocoa powder, but the resulting muffins were really moist because cocoa powder adds some fat along with the flavor.
   
6. (Mommy's job) Spoon batter/dough into muffin cups. I filled 24 mini-cups to the top and had a tiny amount of batter left over. I could probably have done 36 mini-muffins that were all a bit shorter instead.
   
7. (Trystan's job) Count muffins as batter is loaded into each one. If it had been Charlotte helping, she would have had to answer a variety of harder math problems at this stage ("If all 4 of us each eat the same number of muffins, how many would we each get?", etc)
   
8. (Mommy's job) Bake 12-15 minutes (15-20 or so for normal-sized muffins). When you can smell them really strongly, they're probably done. Stick a toothpick in one to check.
   
9. (Trystan's job) Press face to oven window to watch while they bake.
   
10. (Mommy's job) Remove muffins from pan to a cooling rack. Mini muffins are cool enough to eat in less than 5 minutes.
    
11. (Trystan's job) Eat!