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On Sunday, when Mendieta first noticed Christiansen, he had posted just a couple of TikToks about the muffin. (Now, there are 13 and counting.) In these videos, the muffin’s oozing chocolate center is on full display as he raves about them. In his first video trying the muffin, he called it “11/10” and “insane.”
Why not get the recipe straight from the source, the muffin supplier? Because the company is guarding the secret.
So Mendieta, who has been posting recipe videos online for two years since being laid off from a professional kitchen during the pandemic, decided to jump on the trend. Though she’s in the middle of moving cities, muffin duping took priority: She ordered the “very specific” muffin cups she needed and raced back home on Tuesday to her mostly bare kitchen in Los Angeles, now stocked with cocoa powder, flour and chocolate chips. She also dedicated the next few days to intense study of every Olympic muffin video she could find. “It’s the most insane internet sleuthing I’ve ever done,” Mendieta said.
While the experience has been stressful, people online are desperate for the recipe, and Mendieta doesn’t want to let them down.
“This is not just a run-of-the-mill chocolate muffin. There’s layers to it, so it does feel like there’s more pressure,” she said, citing the molten center, cakey texture and chocolate chunks that have captured the internet’s attention.
The muffin is the “Maxi Muffin Chocolat Intense” by French commercial patisserie and international distributor Coup de Pates, which has partnered with the Olympics to provide baked goods to the Village. “The recipe for this muffin with a melting chocolate center and chocolate chips,” the company told The Washington Post in an email, “is a ‘Coup de Pates’ secret crafted by our chefs.”
Mendieta and other baking influencers are determined to unlock the secret. Even for a recipe developer like Mendieta, though, it’s not easy. “It’s really hard to test this thing without having ever had the real muffin right in front of me,” she said. “It’s a muffin from 5,000 miles away that I’ve never crossed paths with.”
Hetal Vasavada, a cookbook author and baker known for her online presence as Milk and Cardamom, also decided to try her hand at the muffins when she saw a video of Christiansen holding four in his hands as he struts around the Olympic Village. She found it intriguing that in Paris, “the land of pastry, this is what they’re obsessing over,” Vasavada said. “I thought it would be croissants or some sort of laminated pain au chocolat, so I was curious and went through his TikToks, which fed the algorithm gods.”
Like many, Vasavada was drawn to the muffins’ gooey filling and deep, dark color, which she re-created using a blend of dark and milk chocolates. Over three recipes tested since the weekend — one that was more lava cake-esque with a standard muffin recipe, one that was more similar to a moist devil’s food cake, and the last one falling somewhere in between — she’s confident she has completed her task. She shared her recipe with her followers on Wednesday night.
Those same details — the runny chocolate core, the rich brown color — drew Mendieta to the muffins, which she’s still working to perfect.
When we speak on Wednesday night, it’s Mendieta’s second day of recipe testing, and version five of the chocolate muffin is in the oven. In just a few minutes, Mendieta will pull them out to find that, at least, they seem to have the right texture, the gooey ridges breaking up the domed muffin top. She didn’t think it would take her this long to develop the recipe. Looking back, she said, it was “so Olympian of me to be like, ‘Yeah, I got it’ on the first try,” but after baking until midnight the night before, she’s getting closer.
In her testing, she’s prioritizing a few things. One is the “perfectly round muffin top,” which can be difficult to achieve in a home oven due to the need for high, consistent heat, but which Mendieta said can be achieved if the muffin batter is chilled for a few hours, so that the starches can absorb the liquids (which makes for a taller bake). To get the right texture, which Mendieta said appears more cakey than a traditional muffin, her recipe (so far) has more sugar than standard. But the thinner batter also means it’s harder to keep the chocolate chunks from sinking to the bottom. That’s what test number five was trying to solve, Mendieta said.
For her recipe, Vasavada said she solved the problem of the sinking chocolate chips by whisking rather than folding the batter — as recipes usually call for bakers to do. While you normally wouldn’t want to overmix muffin batter, doing so in this case, while also double-sifting the dry ingredients, makes for a thicker batter, Vasavada said. “It makes the gluten build a little bit better, so when I put the chips on it holds,” she said.
Perhaps the most important detail, though, is that runny center.
“My first thought was that it was a ganache, kind of a chocolate lava cake where they baked something into the center of this muffin,” Mendieta said. That was where she started, but two hours later, Christiansen posted another video where she could see the muffin oozing from the top. “Now,” she said, “I definitely think it’s piped or injected in after the bake.” (Her TikTok followers aren’t convinced, though, so her most recent batch was half baked-in and half injected.)
Vasavada also piped ganache into her cored muffins, but Mendieta isn’t sure anymore that it’s ganache after all. Maybe, she said, it’s fudge: “A lot of people are saying, ‘Your filling looks lighter in color than the one in the video,’ so it’s either a ganache with a darker chocolate, or a fudge sauce with cocoa powder that’s going to make it a little darker.”
Mendieta has even taken to Coup de Pate’s website, where she found no ingredient list but did see a statement that it contains soy, gluten and dairy as allergens. The soy probably means that there’s canola or vegetable oil, so now she’s using that. She also figures that since the muffin is mass-produced, the ingredients are likely to be simpler than what she tends to go for, and the process can’t be too elaborate or else it would cost too much to make.
“I’m trying to be dialed in on everything that makes this muffin the Olympian of all muffins,” Mendieta said.
At the end of the day, her goal is to finish the recipe as soon as possible, even if that means more sleepless, cocoa-filled nights to come. The fans of the muffin — which grow in number with each passing hour — “are basically beating down my door at this point.”
The Post’s recipes editor, Becky Krystal, said she also studied the TikTok videos “like the Zapruder film,” grabbing the baton from Vasavada and running with her own adjustments in multiple tests. She changed a few things, including the ingredient proportions, mixing method and oven temperature to result in a muffin with a “softer, lighter, more tender crumb.”
“You can imagine how much I was nerding out about this last night,” she said.
Her and Vasavada’s relay effort is your reward: a super-chocolatey, decadent muffin that won’t fuel you to Olympic gold, but just might make you fall in love, like a certain Norwegian swimmer.
