I tried Olympic chocolate muffin dupe recipes — and this one got the gold

You’ve heard of the Olympic chocolate muffins, right? Surely everyone has heard of the Olympic chocolate muffins. We’ve covered the love story between Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen and the Coup de Pates Maxi Muffins with Intense Chocolate, and seemingly everyone in Olympic Village has posted their own taste test. Our lucky co-anchors actually got to try these “11/10” sweet treats on the show, but unless you’re in Paris with them, you’re out of luck.

... or are you?

True to form, the internet has provided dozens of claimants to the copycat recipe throne in just a few days. They’re all chocolate muffins, yes, but they vary widely in texture, ingredients and filling. Which one is the real deal?

I’m a registered dietitian with almost as much experience in food science as I have in eating chocolate, and I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit poring over every Olympic muffin video I could find.

It’s impossible to say for sure what the original is like without trying it, but I’ve gleaned some important clues. The texture looks to be somewhere in the middle between cake and muffin. They’re extra tall in fancy bakery style, with a craggy top, and the square chunks at the crown include some milk chocolate. The muffin itself is super dark cocoa, and the filling usually looks pretty dark, too, but it seems to vary in texture a bit from video to video. I think it’s piped in at the end rather than baked in, but is it ganache? Pastry cream? All the testers have their mouths too blissfully full of muffin to say. I’ve picked out some likely candidates for a marathon baking test in my own kitchen. Can any of our finalists bring home the gold? Let’s find out!

All of these Olympic muffin hopefuls are serving up jumbo-sized muffins, and if you want an authentic look, you’ll need some king-sized tulip parchment liners. For some reason, my local bakery supply was fresh out (Could it be related to this muffin fervor? Quel mystère!), so if yours is too, it’s easy to fold your own from parchment sheets, as I have done here.

Below are the results — three delicious contenders for the best Olympic muffin.

First up, Alex George, representing Lily P. Crumbs.

This self-taught baking contestant has an impeccable pedigree in the sport of recipe testing — her claim to internet fame is an exhaustive ranking of “every chocolate chip cookie recipe on the internet.” She has chosen a bold strategy to nail this instant icon’s reportedly scrumptious texture: She’s using the “muffin method” of mixing wet and dry ingredients separately before combining, but with more cake-like ratios of flour to fat and sugar.

There’s also an interesting twist where she adds boiling water to cocoa before mixing it with sour cream for a silky chocolate base. The resulting batter is on the thin side, and it rises uniformly, with a smooth top, more like a cupcake than a bakery-style muffin.

The ganache of heavy cream and chocolate chips is very simple to make, but George has opted to just top the muffins rather than fill, so this version is missing the gooey middle shown in the Olympic village videos. I also had to make nine muffins instead of the stated 12 to get them into the Olympic-standard height range, perhaps because of the lower baking temperature. This is a deliciously solid effort that any novice baker could manage, though, and I’m awarding this recipe the bronze.

Next, chef Danielle Sepsy representing Got Room for More.

Sepsy is a professional baker with an impressive resume and the top-liked Olympic muffin-inspired video on TikTok, with over 3.2 million views. Her take is the opposite approach to our bronze medalist: She uses the “cake method” of creaming the fats with sugar before alternating dry ingredients with the remaining liquids just until mixed, but the ratios are more like a muffin, with a higher percentage of dry ingredients to wet.

She also has a secret weapon: instant pudding mix, whose cornstarch thickens this batter into something that looks a lot like, well, pudding.

When baked, this recipe yields a crunchier top, and piping in the unconventional sweetened condensed milk ganache makes for a muffin more like Christiansen’s true love, but the leavening is a bit over the top; it rises so much that it falls a bit, and I even detected a hint of baking soda aftertaste. Sepsy takes the silver.

Last, chef Kassie Mendieta representing I Bake Mistakes.

Mendieta, a professional pastry chef, bakery owner and recipe developer, has exhibited the spirit of a true Olympic champion with her efforts to replicate this recipe down to the smallest detail. Despite this contest coming in the middle of her packing to move, she powered through 12 attempted batches and “every bag of chocolate chunks in L.A.” to get it right, heeded commenters’ coaching and pulled out every stop for the tallest, darkest, most handsome muffins on the face of the planet.

There’s a dense crumb, crunchy top and deeply complex, chocolaty flavor. I’m not sure I’ve ever had any baked sweet with quite this level of cocoa-laden goodness, and I’m not the only one who has noticed. When I caught up with Mendieta to talk about her recipe, she was happy to report that many of her followers have already made it.

“I’ve never had people hop on one of my recipes so fast!” she says.

How did she manage this remarkable achievement? Her final version uses the familiar muffin mixing method, but with several innovative features: There’s milk powder, molasses-kissed brown sugar and more sour cream than I would have thought possible, which each contribute to the balance between crispy edges and a decadently moist center. Mendieta also mentions the professional baker’s trick of letting the batter rest, so that any gluten that has formed in the mixing can relax.

“Even if you did overmix it,” she says, “this will be your saving grace so you don’t have a tough muffin, but it also gives the starches in the cocoa powder and flour a chance to evenly hydrate.”

Her recipe has less leavening than some of the others, but plenty of beaten egg and a scorching hot oven for the first few minutes out of the gate really vault that dome to new heights without altering the flavors. She is also the only entrant to understand the importance of an ingredient I was really looking for as I combed through dozens of semifinalist recipes: European chocolate.

It’s not easy to find European chocolate products here in the U.S., but there are a few. Mendieta recommends using French Valrhona cocoa. As for chopping your own chunks, I thought it was worth it to go European-ish there, too, and Cadbury and Chocolove bars are available at some major retailers, like Whole Foods and Target. Why does it matter? Europe has different standards for chocolate composition than the U.S. does, and often at least some of the beans they use are from the Eastern Hemisphere, Africa and the Pacific, rather than South America. It’s not that one is better than the other, but just like coffee or wine, the place where the plant grows affects the flavors and colors in the final product. Just look at our favorite American-style Dutch processed cocoa, Hershey’s, next to Valrhona’s black magic beauty.

If you want a chocolate muffin from Europe, you’d probably better use chocolate from Europe, right? That dark Valrhona cocoa really shows after baking.

Another aspect of Mendieta’s recipe that makes it a cut above is the filling, which is a dark chocolate fudge instead of ganache. She went through three iterations of filling ingredients and techniques before arriving at a fudgy boiled confection, piped into the center. It’s a little more trouble to make, but it’s not difficult, and the color and gloss are worth it — a dead ringer for the Olympic favorite.

It wasn’t easy, but Mendieta’s recipe promises that freezing the muffins overnight before thawing and devouring is worth the wait, a perfect mimic for the way the real Olympic village muffins are stored and served, so I forced myself to tuck them in before bed. Sure enough, it transformed the filling into the perfect decadent, toothsome foil for the craggy, crunchy-edged top and darker-than-dark crumb.

There are good muffins, and then there are great muffins — muffins that you could never get out of a box, muffins with love and toil and dedication baked right in, and Mendieta’s glorious recipe is among the greatest, both head and shoulders and leaps and bounds above the rest.

This one goes to 11. And for that, Mendieta most certainly deserves the gold.

If you’re reading this, you probably won’t get to try an honest-to-goodness Parisan Coup de Pates Maxi Muffin, but you do have until Aug. 11 to whip up a batch of our gold medal winners for 2024 Olympic Games viewing.

Kassie Mendieta’s Olympic Chocolate Muffins

Ingredients

Muffins:

• 200 grams all-purpose flour

• 70 grams Dutch-processed cocoa powder

• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon instant espresso/coffee powder (if you’d like to skip adding instant coffee, you can sub for cold coffee instead)

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 275 grams light brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon milk powder

• 100 grams whole milk

• 150 grams vegetable oil or neutral oil of your choice

• 2 large eggs (100 grams)

• 225 grams sour cream

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

• 115 grams semisweet or dark chocolate chunks (plus extra for the tops)

• 115 grams milk chocolate chips or chunks (plus extra for the tops)

Fudge filling:

• 130 grams water

• 95 grams granulated sugar

• 35 grams Dutch-processed cocoa powder

• 20 grams corn syrup

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 80 grams heavy cream

• 140 grams dark chocolate chips, preferably 70% and above for a really rich filling; use semisweet if you don’t like it as rich

Preparation

For the muffins:

1. In a large bowl, add dry ingredients; whisk to combine.

2. In a separate bowl, add wet ingredients; whisk to combine.

3. Add the wet ingredients into the center of the dry ingredients; whisk to combine, just until no dry pockets remain — you do not want to overmix the batter.

4. Gently fold in the chocolate chunks with a rubber spatula.

5. Set the batter aside for 30 minutes to an hour to rest before baking.

6. While the batter rests, preheat the oven to 420 F and prep the filling.

For the fudge filling:

1. In a saucepot, combine the water, granulated sugar, cocoa powder, salt and corn syrup.

2. Bring this mixture to a boil over medium-heat, stirring often to avoid burning the cocoa powder.

3. Once the mixture reaches a boil, drop the heat to medium-low, cook it while stirring frequently until it reduces by approximately 1/3 of its original volume, 5 to 8 minutes.

4. Add the heavy cream and allow to boil for another 2 minutes.

5. Pour the mixture over the dark chocolate chips. Allow the mixture to sit for a few moments to heat up the chips before whisking to combine. Optionally you can use an immersion blender to really get things nice and smooth.

6. Set aside to cool until it’s time to fill the muffins.

To bake the muffins:

1. Once the batter is done resting, place the muffin liners in every other cavity of the muffin pan.

2. Scoop the batter in to the liners. For jumbo muffins, each cup should be filled a little over 3/4 of the way full and will hold 150 to 160 grams of batter.

3. Bake for six minutes. When the timer beeps, do not open the oven! Drop the temp to 350 F and bake for an additional 15 to 18 minutes. Muffins are done baking when the center is set and a tooth pick inserted into the center comes out with a few crumbs stuck to it, or when the internal temp is 200-205 F.

4. Remove from baking pan and allow to cool completely before filling.

To fill the muffins:

Once the muffins have cooled, you have a few options on how to fill:

• Fill a piping bag with the cooled fudge filling, cut the tip, insert into the center of the muffin and fill.

• Cut out a small crater in the center of the muffin using a paring knife and use a spoon to fill the hole with the sauce.

• Should you have a squeeze bottle lying around, this can also be used similarly to the piping bag to fill the muffin.

For the full Olympic muffin experience (aside from flying to Paris and competing):

Store the leftover muffins in the freezer. Wrap them in plastic wrap and store in an airtight container. When ready to eat, allow to thaw at room temp for and hour and a half. I promise, the freezer will change things for you. The filling doesn’t magically become molten again; rather, it stays a little creamier/fudgier, but I attribute that to the fact that these don’t have any of the crazy emulsifiers a mass-produced muffin does.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com