Eggless Lemon Cocoa cupcakes/ Chocolate & Lemon flavored muffins

Hello, how are you? Have you ever tried baking a cake with a flavor of lemon & cocoa in one? Today I am posting one such simplest bake which is delicious I can say. This time we have good harvest of lemons & this variety is very flavorful and less tangy in taste. Baking a cake with lemon was in my ‘to-do’ since long time. So this was the right time to take action & I did it. I am so happy that my kids asked for a second serving; otherwise they never appreciate homemade food very easily.

Basic recipe I followed was similar to my other eggless cupcake recipes such as cucumber muffins, jack fruit muffins, Apple cinnamoncupcakes, Eggless Guava passion fruit muffins…

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Baking time: 20 minutes

Serves: 12 muffins

Ingredients:

All-purpose flour/ Maida – 1.5 cups

Small semolina/ chiroti rava – ¼ cup

Sugar - ¾ cup

Lemon juice – 2 tsp

Fresh butter milk – 1 cup

Milk – 0.5 cup

Salt – ¼ tsp

Baking soda – ¼ tsp

Cocoa powder – 1 heaped tsp

Ghee/ unsalted butter – 3 tbsp

Lemon zest/ grated outer rind of lemon – 1 tbsp (of 1big lemon)

Method:

• Grate only outer green/ yellow rind of lemon & keep it ready. Extract lemon juice from the lemon keep that separate as well.
• Take a wide mixing bowl. Take ½ cup buttermilk, milk in it. Add lemon juice, sugar and salt to it. Mix once.
• Now add flour, small semolina, Cocoa powder, baking soda and ghee one by one. Combine everything well so that there are no lumps formed. If batter becomes too dry, then add buttermilk to get the right consistency. It should be of dropping consistency (idli batter, neither runny nor too dry).
• Add lemon zest and combine evenly.
• Preheat the oven to 180deg Celsius.
• Fill batter into each muffin mold (liner) equally. Leave little space for the muffins to rise while baking (fill only about ¾ th or little more in each liner).
• Bake for 20 mins or until inserted fork / toothpick comes out clean.
• Once done, allow to cool a bit and garnish with the icing sugar if required.
• Serve warm.

Notes:

• Variations are possible with added choco chips or chopped nuts in the batter.
• If buttermilk is fresh & not sour, then you can just use it and milk can be avoided.
• Ghee residue can be used in the batter if you have. I prepared batter without ghee residue, baked one batch (6 numbers) without it initially and added 2 tsp ghee residue while baking 2^nd batch. Both turned out to be good.