Every morning at 5:30 am like clockwork an alarm goes off down the hallway. It’s the Stormtrooper alarm clock in my son’s room, sitting far enough away from his bed that he has to get out of bed to turn it off. The alarm doesn’t wake him up for school — We walk to school at 7:30 am and it only takes him 10 minutes to get ready in the mornings. It wakes him up for snuggle time.
Every night before he goes to bed, he sets his alarm for 5:30 am so he can get up, walk down the hall, and climb in my bed for morning snuggles.
It didn’t start out this way. In January 2016, I began getting up every morning at 6:00 am to workout for 30 minutes and Carter decided to get up with me. He set his alarm, walked down the hall, woke me up, and stood there until I got out of bed. He was my accountability buddy. This worked great until summer came.
When summer rolled around, our routine fell apart because we traveled so much. And while Carter still set his alarm for 6:00 am, we decided that sleeping in was what summers were made for, and we snuggled in my bed until we got hungry.
I was determined to get back to my morning workouts when school started again in the fall. We made the plan to get out of bed at 6:00 am, but both of us agreed that we missed our snuggle time. So Carter began setting his alarm for 5:30 am so we could snuggle for a half hour before getting up.
The problem was that I didn’t feel like working out. Instead, Carter and I started watching Merlin on Netflix each morning. It was glorious. Then one day, over Christmas break, Carter went to make toaster waffles for breakfast and we were out. No microwave pancakes. No toaster waffles. No cereal.
He doesn’t eat much and he was very upset, so I offered to make him pancakes — real pancakes. The next day, we made blueberry muffins. The day after that, we made waffles. At some point, Carter decided he wanted me to make him breakfast every morning.
Our 2017 morning routine is snuggling from 5:30-6:00 am, then we get dressed and go downstairs, so Carter can make his lunch and I can make him breakfast. Then we watch our current show until 7:30 am when we walk to school.
This is all fine and dandy until we get back from Hawaii, wake up to make breakfast, and realize that we have no pancake mix, no blueberry muffin mix, and no butter. Crap. Carter’s little face was so sad.
I checked the pantry, found a leftover stick of butter-flavor shortening from Christmas baking, and googled a muffin recipe that uses shortening. I found one on Food.com, but modified it to use almond milk.
Carter was so happy we found a recipe that didn’t use butter and that we had all of the ingredients. I was happy that the recipe is so easy and that the muffin batter was ready to go in the oven in no time.
We decided to make mini muffins because they’re Carter’s favorite.
The fabulous smell of the Chocolate Chip Cookie Mini Muffins baking brought Natalie downstairs just in time to eat them. Thank goodness she came down too, otherwise she wouldn’t have had any. They were so good that Carter and I might have eaten them all ourselves.
These Chocolate Chip Cookie Mini Muffins taste like extra fluffy, extra soft chocolate chip cookies. It was almost as if we used cookie dough in the muffin pan instead of muffin batter.
While Carter found them to be more like cookies and dessert than a breakfast food, Natalie absolutely loved them and asked me to make them again!
Chocolate Chip Cookie Mini Muffins
These mini muffins taste just like fresh, thick, chewy chocolate chip cookies.
Prep Time
Cook Time
Total Time
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup shortening, butter flavor
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup almond milk
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 1 cup flour
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a mini muffin pan (or spray with baking spray).
- In a large mixing bowl, beat sugar and shortening until fluffy. Add egg, almond milk, and vanilla, and mix well.
- Slowly add all dry ingredients to the mixture and stir until completely combined. Add chocolate chips, stirring just enough to combine.
- Fill mini muffin cups with about 1 tablespoon muffin batter. Bake for 11 minutes or until the edges begin to brown or a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.
