Chocolate Hazelnut Muffins

For my last batch of muffins in February, I decided to go all out and make something chocolatey, which I had been avoiding for most of the month because it's much harder to feign eating a healthy breakfast with a chocolate muffin stuffed in your mouth. These muffins have chocolate and hazelnuts in them, as well as a dollop of Nutella inside which is melty and extra delicious if you eat these muffins when they're still warm. (Full disclosure, I actually used Korger's brand of Nutella because they have a crunchy version that has little bits of hazelnut in it, too. You can use whatever kind you prefer though.)

Cinnamon Donut Muffins

Have you ever had those little, pre-packaged, cinnamon-coated donuts? These muffins taste a lot like those except more awesome because they're homemade. I used to make them at the coffee shop all the time, and it was always hard to sell them to customers rather than eating them myself. They're that delicious. The secret to these muffins is butter. You dip them in butter and then roll them in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. Not only does this make the cinnamon-sugar actually stick to the outside of the muffins, it gives them a bit of extra moisture and a ton of extra richness. If you're looking to save on calories, you can just dip the tops in butter instead, though believe me, you'll be missing out on the extreme deliciousness of a fully-coated muffin.

Tea & Honey Muffins

This year Justin and I decided that instead of making New Year's resolutions that we had try to keep for the whole year, we would make monthly resolutions and try to stick to them for 30 days at a time. Then the next month we'd make a new resolution, continuing this throughout the year. I decided to take it a step further and make three resolutions each month--one food, one fitness, and one personal. My food resolution for February is that I will eat breakfast every day. Too often I have a habit of waking up, jumping on the compuer and killing a few hours, and then discovering that it's lunchtime and I've yet to eat anything. For these 28 days, I'm trying to be very cognizant of that and make sure that I have some form of breakfast each and every morning, even if that's just a big cup of hot chocolate; I just need to have some kind of caloric intake to start out the day.

My go-to breakfast is usually a bowl of cereal. I decided to try to change it up this month and try out some new recipes, as well as making some old favorites. One of my favorite breakfast options is homemade muffins. They're incredibly versatile and can be as healthy (or not) as you want them to be. A basic muffin recipe also lends itself well to the addition of a variety of mix-ins and flavorings. For these particular muffins, I've adapted a basic recipe from King Arthur Flour. Some muffin recipes come out too light, crumbly, and cupcake-y for my taste, but these are much more dense and hearty like a good muffing should be. Any strongly brewed black tea will work here. I used some of my favorite tea--an apricot-flavored blend of Ceylon and Darjeeling--that we had at the coffee shop where I worked, but plain black tea from Luzianne or Lipton or something would be just as good. Tea isn't known for giving a very strong flavor to baked goods, so the stronger the brew the better.