Quality street muffins

I have been obsessed with thinking of crazy things you could put into muffins. My colleague (check out her cakes at Fairy Scrumptious) makes the dreamiest red velvet cupcakes with caramel filling. This got me thinking... caramel... caramel and chocolate (since I think of chocolate more than the average male teenager thinks about... well you know)... And my thoughts led me to Quality street. So I took my favourite muffin recipe (still, stolen from Kinuskikissa, the amazing Finnish baking blog) and literally threw in a few Quality Streets for good measure.


Also, another thing I had wanted to try for a while was the new Cadbury Philadelphia. Match made in heaven. Cream cheese... good! Chocolate.... good! Combine them, and what can you get except something good. Makes a perfect topping.


So, the good old trusty muffin recipe, makes 6
75 g butter
65 g caster sugar
1 egg
1.5 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp vanilla sugar (or vanilla extract)
115 g white flour
75 ml milk
6 Quality Street


80 g Cadbury Philadelphia (that's half a pack, leaving the other half to be enjoyed while baking, or saved for later if you can resist...)
a splash of Bailey's (coffee flavoured or other)


The howto:
1. Preheat oven to 225 C. 
2. Beat together butter and caster sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg. 
3. Mix dry ingredients, and sift into the butter/sugar/egg mix. This is where you should, in theory, carefully fold the mixture using a spatula. I just mix for a few seconds with the electric mixer...  
4. Add milk and mix. 
5. Spoon some batter into muffin moulds or a tin (I prefer silicon moulds), add a Quality street then top with more batter. Leave room in the moulds, as the mixture will rise quite a lot in the oven. 

6. Bake muffins for 12-15 minutes, or until they look done.  

7. Mix the Bailey's and cream cheese. Pipe onto the muffins when they have cooled.


Each muffin (if you make 6 from the recipe above) is approximately 310 kcal (15g fat, 36g total carbs, 4.8g protein). Please note that the calorie contents are estimates only, and will vary depending on the ingredients you use. If you are as obsessed with calories as I am, I suggest you do your own calculations based on your specific ingredients. 


The verdict:
Me and my friend ate these in one sitting. I guess that's all the verdict you need. However, they are pretty sweet, so consider yourself warned. Some candies made it through better than others. The ones with white goo inside (strawberry and orange) did get a bit hard and unpleasant, so I suggest avoiding those. I didn't even try to use the ones with toffee, as I was afraid they get so hard someone would break a tooth. The orange chocolate, the purple one, the solid chocolate (the green one), caramel swirl and vanilla fudge all turned out great. Just pick your favourite, and make sure you know which one is which when they come out of the oven so you don't accidentally end up with the coconut one (ewww... although I didn't put any of them in at all, as it would have been a tragedy to get stuck with having to eat one).