Little chocolate chip cakes, filled with spiced apple sauce, then drizzled with salted caramel. This makes a lot more sauce than is needed for the recipe, but it's very nice atop a bowl of steaming porridge at this time of year.
Peel, core and chop the apples. Place in a pan with a dash of water, the rum, sugar (add more if you prefer it sweeter) and cinnamon. Simmer gently until the apples are soft. Make sure they don’t catch on the bottom of the pan, but don’t add too much extra water as the sauce needs to be thick. Purée with a stick blender and set aside.
1 kg cooking apples, 100 g light muscovado sugar, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 tbsp rum
Cake Batter
Pour the vinegar into the milk, stir and leave to curdle. This is a quick way of making cheat’s buttermilk.
140 ml milk, 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Sieve the dry ingredients, including the caster sugar into a large bowl and make a well in the centre.
275 g flour, 2 tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), 2 tsp mesquite powder, 100 g golden caster sugar
Break in the eggs, add the melted butter and stir gently from the middle outwards adding the milk gradually as you go until everything is just mixed. Gently stir in 60g of the chopped chocolate.
2 large eggs, 75 g butter, 60 g milk chocolate
Place a tbsp of batter at the bottom of twelve muffin cases. Drop in a heaped tsp of apple sauce and cover with the remaining batter. Take a cocktail stick and swirl the batter and sauce around a little.
Bake at 180℃ (350℉, Gas 4) for 23 minutes or until the cakes are well risen and firm to the touch. Leave to cool for a couple of minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Topping
Drizzle the salted caramel over the tops whilst still warm, then scatter over the remaining chocolate.
12 tsp salted caramel, 20 g milk chocolate
Notes
Use salted caramel milk chocolate if you can get hold of some. Otherwise a good quality plain milk chocolate is fine.If you want to make your own salted caramel, you can find the recipe I used for these in this salted caramel chocolate cake.Please note: calories and other nutritional information are per serving. They’re approximate and will depend on exact ingredients used.