Coconut Cherry Chocolate Chip Muffins

The shredded coconut, tart dried cherries and vanilla 

The finished muffins!

I ride the commuter train to work each day and have made two friends on the train; Carl, a married man with adult kids who works in the medical supply industry, and Sarah, a super bright young woman who graduated with a Master's degree from UC Berkeley, speaks four languages fluently and is a super wife to boot. The three of us always sit together and chit chat. 

I was always impressed and somewhat envious that my friend Sarah always has a homemade muffin for breakfast. I'm a decent cook but not much of a baker, but she insisted it's easy to bake muffins, so I've gotten into making muffins. So far I've made blueberry, banana chocolate and a few weeks ago I made chocolate coconut muffins, and they were really good. I love coconut, and shredded coconut makes muffins dense and moist, like carrot cake. This week I was going to make coconut-cherry-vanilla muffins, but Jake wanted me to add chocolate chips as well, so I did.

I started with a base of this recipe. Chocolate Coconut Muffins

Modifications:

I cut the chocolate chips down to 1/3 cup. We used miniature chocolate chips. I wanted to use white chocolate, but we only had regular chocolate, so I used that. Next time I will use white chocolate. 

I used 1/3 cup tart dried cherries*, which come whole and are pretty large, so I rough chopped them. The rest of the recipe is the same! My oven cooks a little strangely, so I checked my muffins after 20 minutes and let them go another 5 minutes for a total of 25 minutes. Some of the coconut topping was getting burned while other parts of it didn't toast, but other than that, the muffins are perfect!

 - Dani Wendy

*Other things you can do with the remaining cherries: add to a spinach, feta, cherry and pecan salad. Add to your granola and yogurt.