Done in by Caramel Cupcakes

My son loves eating muffins. He likes to have one for breakfast. He's absolutely adorable when he picks up an enormous Costco muffin in his tiny little hands. It's gerbilesque in its cuteness.

So, yesterday, when The Boy was despairing that his daddy wouldn't be home when we got home (he takes night classes), I suggested that we make some muffins. Because we were out of Costco muffins, and I already foresaw the tantrum he would throw in the morning. So why not kill two birds with one stone? This tantrum and the next one? And heck, it's good family cooking fun, too.

So The Boy agreed that muffins would be a good idea, and his tantrum was averted. He was giddy and excited about cooking muffins. He loves cooking, he loves muffins. He really likes to "taste" the ingredients. Often. Especially the sugar.

His favorite muffin is the poppyseed muffin. Oh, he eats so many of these, that the lucky person changing his diaper can tell for days that he's been eating poppyseeds. But I have no poppyseeds at home, so I suggested we make apple muffins. Apple! That's almost healthy! And he agreed, apple muffins. When we were nearly home, the evil radio had a commercial featuring chocolate. At which point The Boy declared he wanted to make chocolate muffins with chocolate chips. Oh dear -- that's not quite as healthy as I had planned. But... no matter. We will make chocolate muffins.

We returned home, and I looked for a chocolate muffin recipe, and couldn't find one! I couldn't even find one on the internet that looked appealing, or that I had all the ingredients to. So I looked in Fine Cooking. I adore that magazine. Everything is so yummy. Though I still could not find a chocolate muffin recipe that didn't involve an ingredient I did not have (white chocolate, raspberries, etc) or that I didn't want to feed my son (espresso!).

So I settled on something similar that I knew would appeal -- the caramel cupcake. Okay, we're veering more towards unhealthy here. This is no longer a muffin (and frankly, they're just little cakes) but a full fledged cup cake, complete with icing. Oh well, The Boy approved (he adores caramel!) so we made those muffins. I have an adorable little mini muffin tin, so I thought what better way to make sure I don't eat too many, than to make tiny muffins!

No. Does not work that way. Instead, the tiny, scrumtious, little caramel cupcakes just caused me to need to eat many of them. So cute. So tasty. And so the reason I lost a few marks for temptation and moderation!!

But I think Ben* would have liked them.


(* -- Franklin, silly.)