Good Morning! 

I hope you had a great week and your Friday is starting off on the right foot! We have an extra exciting weekend around here with 2 of our best friends getting married in DC on Sunday! Shout out to Desiree and Andre – 2 day count down 🙂  

I have a confession… I’m a Muffin Mangler… It’s a really bad habit of mine that I’ve had all my life. I’d like to say that I’m working on it or that is has gotten better as I’ve gotten older, but that just isn’t true. You are probably asking yourself, what the heck is a Muffin Mangler? Let me explain… 

Growing up my mom would almost always have a batch or 2 of muffins in our freezer. Rather than taking a whole muffin out of the freezer like a normal person, I would pull the top off the muffin (the best part) and leave the rest for someone else. But it didn’t stop there… often they were some form of chocolate chip muffin, so not only would I remove the tops, I would also pick the chocolate chips out of the muffin body. Needless to say my family would be pretty peeved when they would go for a muffin only to find them mangled and topless! 

You may asking – “why?” But, come on, we all know muffin tops are the best part of a muffin. So, again, you might ask, “why not just bake muffin tops or just eat chocolate chips straight from a bag?”While valid questions, the simple answer to both is “it’s just not the same”. There is something about a baked chocolate chip that will trump one straight from the bag any day. And a muffin top baked alone is kind of silly, right? How can something be a top if it has no bottom? It just doesn’t make sense. 

For these reasons, if you look in my freezer, you will still find topless, mangled muffins – sorry. And, as you may have guessed, these White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cacao Muffins have turned victim as well. 

Look at those muffin tops! The tops came out perfectly. They are crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside and the white chocolate macadamia nut combo is one of my favorites! They are made with cacao powder instead of cocoa powder to give them their chocolate flavor. Fun fact: Cacao is chocolate in it’s purest form – it’s much less processed than cocoa powder and therefore is full of antioxidants, high in fiber and rich in magnesium and calcium. I’m pretty sure when you bake it it losses some of those magical health benefits, but still better than normal cocoa power, right? They are also made with coconut oil as a substitute for butter. So with the cacao and the coconut oil and the mere fact that I chose to call them muffins they are a breakfast food – Happy breakfasting 🙂