How to make big bakery style sour cream chocolate chip muffins from scratch without a mixer! These soft, moist, fluffy café style muffins with big, crispy tops are the muffins of your dreams.
Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Muffins
Who else absolutely loves having chocolate chip muffins for breakfast? They’re so good, especially the ones from the bakeries and the café but those cost an arm and a leg and most of the time they’re filled preservatives.
So me being obsessed with these muffins and also obsessed with baking muffins in general, naturally I had to figure out an easy way to make them.
With this recipe you don’t have to make a trip to the bakery or the café, so you not only save money but you save yourself from those preservatives too.
Plus, homemade baked goods always taste better.
How to make Bakery Style Muffins
The Leavening Ingredients
When it comes to bakery style muffins there needs to be more baking powder or baking soda than average in order for the muffins to rise and to create those big tops that we all love.
The Quantity of Batter
There needs to be enough batter to fill the muffin cups all the way to the top otherwise you won’t end up with jumbo cafe style muffins. They basically need to be almost overflowing.
The Baking Temperature
Typically, muffins are baked at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, but because there is so much batter in jumbo muffin recipes you need more heat for it to fully rise.
Usually, in order for that to happen they need to be baked at a very high temperature for about 5 minutes then it’s reduced slightly until they’re baked all the way through.
This method causes air bubbles to quickly expand the batter and allows the muffins to rise at a rapid rate creating those gigantic muffin tops.
I tried this exact method for this recipe but it didn’t work out. So I decided to bake them at 375 degrees all the way through. Now, I didn’t know if this would work because big bakery style muffins aren’t usually made like this but my gut was telling me to just give it a try.
I watched that oven like a hawk. They hardly rose for the first 15 minutes and I was sure that it was a complete fail. But then, when I peeped through the oven window at the 20-minute mark they were huge! I was so happy! I couldn’t believe that it actually worked.
Easy Chocolate Chip Muffin Recipe
I managed to make this recipe completely without a mixer and also one-bowl. That’s right, one less bowl to clean, and no, it’s not too good to be true. It actually works.
This is an amazing recipe. I’ve really outdone myself with this one. Seriously.
I made sure that every step is simple, straightforward, and easy to follow. Since jumbo muffin recipes can be really intimidating, I tried my best to make this one as foolproof as possible.
So if I can tackle it, so can you.
Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins
One of the reasons why bakery style muffins taste so good is because of the dairy! Yes, there’s lots in those bad boys and that’s why they’re so high in calories, along with the sugar amount.
This recipe uses a whole cup of full-fat sour cream. Oh, yes, we are going all out. This is not the time to skim on anything. In addition to that there’s three-quarters of a cup of butter.
You already know that any recipe that calls for butter and sour cream is fattening but so sooooo good!
Sour Cream in Muffins
Sour cream is high in fat and very creamy so it provides moisture, makes muffins soft, and gives them flavor too. Since it is an acidic ingredient, it also helps to neutralize the baking soda.
If you do not have any sour cream on hand you can simply substitute it with full-fat greek yogurt.
Butter in Muffins
These muffins are made without oil. Instead, they’re made with softened butter because it adds richness and gives them a distinct flavor that just cannot be replaced. It also helps to give them a soft and tender crumb.
Chocolate Chip Muffins without Buttermilk
When it comes to baking, the purpose of buttermilk is mostly to tenderize the crumb, add moisture, and to give baked goods a distinct flavor (similar to the way butter does). It’s also acidic which makes it perfect for baked goods with large amounts of leavening ingredients.
Most chocolate chip muffin recipes call for buttermilk but you won’t need any for this one!
There’s just a little bit of regular milk in this recipe to mostly stretch the batter without adding much fat so I recommend using either 2% or skim. Whole milk would probably be a bit too heavy. Remember, there’s plenty of fat in this recipe already, but if you give it a try, let me know how it turns out in the comments below.
When it comes to making bakery style muffins the more leavening ingredients the better, as long as you can’t taste it.
Because of the amount of sour cream and brown sugar in this recipe I was able to get away with adding quite a good bit of baking soda and baking powder considering that there’s nothing else besides those two ingredients for neutralization.
Also, there are 4 eggs in this recipe because not only is the batter thick, there’s a lot of it and it needs all the lift and moisture it can get.
For this recipe I used both sugars because brown sugar in muffins is the bomb. It gives them so much flavor (which these muffins need) and moisture as well, and the white sugar helps to create those beautiful crispy tops. There’s one and a quarter cups of sugar in this recipe in total which I know sounds like a massive amount but as I said before there’s a lot of batter and if we are doing it like the pros we gotta go all the way. That’s why there’s so much vanilla too. We can’t hold back on the flavor.
In my opinion, there’s a perfect amount of chocolate chips in these muffins. Feel free to add more or less depending on your personal preference. It’s best to use mini chocolate chips because then you get more chocolate in every bite, they’re evenly dispersed throughout the batter and also it’s just authentic. The regular-sized kind is fine but mini-sized is just so much better!
Now that you know how easy it is to make sour cream chocolate chip muffins from scratch, you can make them all the time!
Okay, maybe not all the time but for those special-occasion breakfasts.
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Bakery Style Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins
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Ingredients
- 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) salted butter, softened
- 1 cup full-fat sour cream
- 3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 4 eggs
- 1/3 cup milk
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (preferably mini-sized)
- Coarse sugar or white sugar, for sprinkling
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375°F. Line muffin pan with muffin liners and set aside.
- In a large bowl combine the butter and sour cream.
- Add both sugars, baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and mix well.
- Beat in the eggs then stir in the milk and vanilla extract.
- Add the flour and gently mix until fully incorporated. Do not overmix! Fold in the chocolate chips.
- Scoop the batter into the muffin pan filling the cups to the very top. Sprinkle the top of each muffin with a pinch of coarse sugar or white sugar.
- Bake for 22 – 24 minutes until tops are domed and spring back when lightly pressed and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with a few crumbs (not wet batter!).
- Cool in pan 5 minutes then remove to cool completely or serve while warm.
Notes

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12 comments
These look tasty! Are you using a regular sized muffin tin? TIA
Thank you, Amber! And yes.
This looks great. Can’t wait to try them. Quick question …The recipe calls for ‘salted’ butter? Not unsalted? Thanks so much?
Thank you! Yes, salted butter. However, if you only have unsalted on hand add 1/4 teaspoon + 1/8 teaspoon of salt (in addition to the 1/2 teaspoon that is already in the recipe).
These muffins came out looking just like your picture and are delicious! Thanks!
Delicious and they came out looking exactly like your pictures. Thanks!
Woohoo! Happy to hear that! Thank you for the 5-star rating, Cheryl.
Excellent recipe! I love baking and making muffins. I didn’t have sour cream, so I used Cherry yogurt. Added chocolate syrup to the milk and used about 1.5 cups of milk chocolate chips. They poofed up great! Taste wonderful too! Made 6 huge muffins and 2 muffin tops.
Cherry chocolate muffins; that sounds great! I’m happy you liked them. I’ve never tried this recipe with yogurt before. Thanks for leaving a review.
Excellent recipe. I particularly appreciate that you listed the ingredients in the order in which they are used in preparation. The results were highly successful, as well.
I omitted the vanilla since I was interested in more of a sweet cream base. I ate one muffin when they were fresh and another for breakfast this morning, and my husband had one for dessert last night. The first muffin I tried, I hit a patch of poorly mixed baking soda, which wasn’t great; but the others seem to have been fine. So I think the extract is, in fact, optional.
Per the Bakerpedia reference formulation for muffins (https://bakerpedia.com/processes/muffins/), the amount of sugar can go as low as 55% of the amount of flour by weight in the recipe. 2.5 cups of all-purpose flour is 362.5 grams, so 55% of that works out to a minimum of about 200 grams of sugar for the batch. I therefore used 125 grams of brown sugar, or a generous half-cup, and 75 grams of unbleached cane sugar, or 3/8ths of a cup. This resulted in a very subtle sweetness to the muffin, allowing the chocolate to really stand out.
For the chocolate, I used Aldi semi-sweet Belgian chocolate chunks, which I coated in a few pinches of the flour I measured out for the muffins before folding the chocolate in, to prevent sinking. I also pressed a few chunks into the top of the muffin to make sure there would be at least a few inclusions right on the surface. This seems to have been successful. I would also recommend spooning a bit of plain batter into the bottom of each cup, since the batter is very thick and will hold inclusions nicely in place.
Like GRAMMACAT, I didn’t have sour cream, so I used mango flavor kefir and bittersweet chips. They came out perfectly and the flavor combination is incredible. Great recipe and well written out. Thanks!
Thank you. I try my best to make the instructions as clear and concise as possible. Oh, that’s an interesting choice. I’m glad it worked out.