Cream Cheese Yogurt Chocolate Chip Muffins

Cream Cheese filled Chocolate chip Yogurt Muffins, lovely texture, beautiful flavor. And your breakfast just became sweeter with a somewhat "healthy" approach.

I am used to cook and bake without butter. My family hardly ever had (and still has) any butter in the fridge, my mother being strongly against it. We bought it once in a while just for risotto, because even my mother never finished a risotto without a dollop of butter, as tradition demands it. For the rest, when we wanted to bake, we used extra virgin olive oil, milk and yogurt. I have to say that my palate is now accustomed to those flavors, and cakes and cookies rich in butter are not amongst my  favorite. Same destiny had the sugar, she usually cut the required dose at least in half and so our sweets were never too sweet.

As a consequence, even when I left home and started a family of my own,  I carried her teachings with me. Olive oil and/or yogurt appeared in my baking all the time. Together with organic flours, often gluten-free flours, natural sweeteners, fruit, and good quality dark chocolate (at least 70%). Baked goods are my favorite breakfast and mid afternoon snack: loaves, coffee cakes, scones, and muffins alternate in my baking and I always make sure to have some. Of course there are recipes that I still make using butter, but if and when I can choose I switch to yogurt and vegetable oils (olive, canola, peanut, coconut, sunflower).

How these Cream Cheese Yogurt Muffins came to be.

Every once in a while we have breakfast at the cafe inside the Old Strathcona Farmer's Market where we meet some friends and we spend some lovely time there. While Loreto prefers his breakfast savory and usually sticks to a bagel sandwich, I like my sweets and lately found a pumpkin cream cheese filled muffin,  so good. The muffin is pretty good but I can taste a good amount of butter. I wanted to recreate the cream cheese filled muffin last Sunday morning for our breakfast. I searched far and wide on the internet but most of the recipes had butter amongst the other ingredients, so I thought to add "yogurt" in the search and among the ones that came up, I chose one that resonated with me. In the fridge we had a beautiful, creamy and rich cherry greek yogurt that I thought to be perfect in combination with the semisweet mini chocolate chips and the cream cheese filling, kind of like a "black forest" muffin. Delicious!

I used my preferred muffin liners, that make for large muffins, ideal for breakfast and I got to use for the first time my new toy, a Kitchen Aid mixer. So much fun in the kitchen, lol.

These cream cheese yogurt muffins were ready in almost no time for our breakfast. We split two open when they were just out of the oven, the steam coming out from the center, the cream cheese soft and oozing, with that nice acidic/sweet combination to the mix.  They are moist and flavorful,  morsels of mini chocolate chips a welcome surprise at every bite, the cherry flavor blending nicely with the chocolate and the other ingredients, giving these muffins a darker color with hues of reddish purple.

Hope you enjoy them as much as we did. I froze a few just to have them ready for those times when we are craving them.

Song of the day: "Hymn For The Weekend", Coldplay. Happy Father's Day to my North American friends!

Cream Cheese Yogurt Chocolate Chip Muffins

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• Prep Time: 10 minutes
• Cook Time: 20 minutes
• Total Time: 30 minutes
• Yield: 12 big muffins 1x

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Ingredients

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• 2 organic, free-range eggs
• 2 cups all purpose flour (I used 1 and ¾ all-purpose +¼ coconut flour)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup mini dark or semisweet chocolate chips
• ½ cup light brown sugar
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 1 Tbsp pure vanilla extract
• ½ cup cup vegetable oil (I used cold pressed organic canola oil)
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup Greek yogurt (I used cherry Greek yogurt)

Filling

• 4 oz cream cheese
• 1 Tbsp any sweetener you want

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Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin pans with paper baking cups.
2. In the bowl of a mixer stir eggs with sugar and oil, beat until creamy.
3. Add vanilla, apple cider vinegar, baking soda, and salt. Mix in Greek yogurt then, slowly, stir in flour.
4. Lastly add in chocolate chips and mix gently with a spatula.
5. Fill muffin cups with about 2 tablespoons of muffin batter. Add about 1 heaping teaspoon of cream cheese to the center of each muffin, then top with another 1 tablespoon of batter.
6. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. (It depends on the size of the muffins, the smaller they are less time they take).
7. Cool 5 minutes in pan then remove to a rack to cool completely.
8. Store in an airtight container for up to three days or freeze for up to one month.

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