Mom's Chocolate Frosting

Sometimes you just have to make your mom's chocolate frosting.

 And today, well, today was one of those times. Let me give you a breakdown of the things that happened this morning--all before 7am, I might add. 

• We discovered that a Sam's Club sized bottle of corn oil had somehow cracked during the night and leaked all over our pantry/laundry room floor. 

• Then, we discovered that we had somehow forgotten to start the dryer last night, which had our son's school uniforms in it, still wet, of course. 

• Then, the hubs discovered that one of our Golden Retrievers, Chewy, had somehow, without us even being aware it was happening, gotten diarrhea while in his crate. (I know, totally NOT what you want to read about when looking at a recipe…I'm really sorry.)

• Upon making that discovery, my hubs also noticed that somehow our other Golden Retriever, Sadie, had opened up her crate and escaped and had been roaming freely all night long and during that bout of freedom decided to leave a big pile of poop in the corner. 

• Then, upon entering our master bathroom to get dressed for the day, I encountered the fact that my 4-year-old son had decided to pee all over the seat, toilet bowl and floor…guess he forgot to aim…

You know the type: "THAT" kind of a morning! And all of this happened before we were even fully awake, i.e., before we'd even had a single drop of coffee in our systems. Needless to say, it was a super fun morning. :-) Somehow, we still made it out the door and miraculously got the kids to school on time. After that, I sort of expected one of "those" kind of days to continue, but after it all shook down this morning, we both took the time to really pray about it and ask God what He wanted us to do with our day…what we needed to take from this and how to go about making sure all the annoying things that happened didn't lead us to having poor attitudes all day long…and thankfully, we were both able to continue the day with the right perspective and attitudes and we were still able to have a good day in spite of the way it began.

But, since we did go through so much this morning, I felt we really deserved an awesome dessert tonight. So I made a yellow box cake mix and the most wonderful thing in the world to put on top of that is only my mom's delicious, incredible, rich, chocolate frosting. Oh man...

Frosts 12 cupcakes

1/2 cup cocoa
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1/4 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 tablespoon instant coffee
2 2/3 cup powdered sugar

Directions:
Beat butter until creamy. Slowly mix in cocoa, stirring until well combined. Alternately add the powdered sugar, vanilla and milk, stirring well after each addition and scraping down the bowl as needed. Stir in the instant coffee until mixed in evenly. Frost cooled cupcakes or cake.

The instant coffee is truly the "secret" ingredient that MAKES this frosting. Of course, I am a huge coffee fanatic, so I like to err on the side of more is best if you know what I mean. So if you're not a big fan of coffee, just start with a single teaspoon or so and taste and add more if you want. The coffee really sets off the chocolate flavor and makes it so much richer and chocolatier…in my humble opinion, this frosting just isn't the same without it. But to each his/her own! :) I also like to use half dark cocoa and half regular cocoa because I love dark chocolate, but it's good either way. This is the frosting that I grew up on, the one my five siblings and I would fight over who got to lick the beater, the one we requested on our birthday cakes, the one I still love to sneak a spoonful of right after its all mixed up. Mmmm. It truly is the best!!