Whether you’re on the move or packing a work or school lunchbox, you might want to pack a sugar-free muffin as a little treat. If sugar-free baking is beyond you, you might be tempted to try the Skinny Food Co. Double Choc Chip Flavour Muffin Mix.
Skinny Food Co. is a popular store for sugar-free and low sugar chocolate, bakes, and treats, so we thought we’d test out their low sugar muffin mix. Read on to see what we thought of it.
Price and availability
The Skinny Food Co. Double Choc Chip Flavour Muffin Mix is an own-brand product, meaning you can buy it directly from Skinny Food Co. At £4.99, it costs more than the Betty Crocker Vanilla and Chocolate Sugar-Free baking mixes, both of which cost £3, but less than the £9 you’ll pay for the Groovy Keto Lemon Baking Mix.
You can buy it on Amazon, it was out of stock at the time of writing, as well as some health stores.
What ingredients are in it?
Fortified wheat flour, soluble corn fibre, cocoa powder, chocolate flavour chips (made with maltitol), corn starch, whey protein concentrate (milk), raising agents, natural flavourings, salt, and sucralose (the sweetener).
Sucralose is Skinny Food Co’s sweetener of choice in their muffin mix; it’s a zero calorie artificial alternative to caster sugar. It’s also 600 times sweeter per gram than white sugar. Sucralose is the main ingredient in Splenda, but you would’ve encountered it elsewhere: it’s popular.
As with most sweeteners, sucralose doesn’t create a blood glucose spike, making these muffins, in theory, diabetic friendly. Per 41g muffin, you’ll consume 0.2g of sugars. While that might seem like good news for diabetics, the wheat flour contributes 30g of carbohydrates per muffin, so you’ll still need to count the muffins when working out your insulin.
Preparing
As per the instructions, we tipped the baking mix into a large bowl. To keep things simple, the mix already had the chocolate chips in it, rather than having to find and empty them from a separate packet.
Next, we cracked in three large eggs, then poured in 25ml of oil and 85ml of water and whisked it until smooth, bar the little chocolate chip lumps.
It was a very runny mix with a silky finish. When spooning the mix into muffin cases, it took a lot of bashing the spoon and drip control, but eventually, the cases were filled. Hopes for an even distribution of chocolate chips was low – as the mix was thin, the chips had either sunk or stuck themselves to the side of the bowl. The wetness of the mix also didn’t raise our confidence that the muffins would rise.
As is law, I gave the spoon a lick once all the mix had left the bowl. And oh my, the sweetener was strong with this one. Neither of the Betty Crocker mixes or the Groovy Keto Lemon Cake tasted this artificial. Hopes for a relatively-normal tasting chocolate chip muffin hit a record low.
Baking
The packet claims this mix can make 10 muffins – that’s a lie. Ten cupcakes, yes. Muffins? No. We managed seven muffins; dividing the mixture between more cases would’ve meant ending up with cakes thinner than a bourbon. Of course, Skinny Food Co. could’ve used a really small muffin case when developing their muffin mix.
As per the instructions, we baked it for 12 minutes in an oven pre-heated to 180C. At the 12 minute mark, we skewered a muffin to check its doneness; the skewer came out clean so we took that as our queue to take them out, stick them on the worktop, and let them cool.
Once cooled, we moved the muffins from the cake tray to a plate to finish the cool – the tops had a similar colour to the raw cake mix while the sides had a darker crust.
What did we think of the Skinny Food Co. Double Choc Chip Flavour Muffin Mix?
The muffins had a fair crust – rather than the 12 minutes on the packet, these muffins would’ve been more than alright with 10 minutes, to keep that exterior crust thin. Once you get past that, the chocolate cake was light, soft, and not overly dry. Each muffin had a sticky top, mind you, which left cake residue stuck to finger pads. More than anything, the diabetic was surprised that the muffin didn’t need a pint of water to help it down their gullet; most shop-bought sugar free cakes are impossibly dry to chew and swallow.
But what do the muffins taste like?
We tried it plain to start with, the diabetic taste tester (the spoon licker) was quite surprised as the strong sweetener flavour wasn’t as noticeable. The non-diabetic taste tester, though, commented on how strong the flavour and aftertaste of the sweetener was. To quote her, “it was like dipping your finger in a Stevia packet and licking it.”
For her second muffin, however, the diabetic taste tester had a different experience. The second muffin had a very strong fizzy aftertaste, not dissimilar to the experience of eating a bake with an excess of baking soda, that lingered beyond half a pint of water and a glass of milk. The artificial sucralose was stronger than the chocolate flavour itself.
Biting into a chocolate chip didn’t produce a cooling effect in the mouth, like what we’ve come to expect from maltitol from the Betty Crocker Chocolate and Vanilla sugar-free baking mixes. The quantity of maltitol in each chip obviously being too small to produce any noticeable effect.
Both the diabetic and non-diabetic testers preferred the muffins in a bowl with lashings of double cream, thus wiping away any health benefits of eating sugar-free cake.
Would we buy the Skinny Food Co. Double Choc Chip Flavour Muffin Mix again?
No, we wouldn’t. That artificial sucralose aftertaste was just far too strong.
