Heavenly Chocolate Frosting

Everyone is hungry today but me. It's rare that I'm full, but today I am. It's a fluke, I tell you.

When I'm hungry, I go to the store and buy super-good groceries and cook real dinners for everyone. But I'm not hungry, and I'm not in the mood to shop (that's a fluke too!) so I decided we could bake some things for the rest of the people in this house to eat. Maybe they'll get filled up on the baked things, and I won't have to make dinner, I thought.

The children and the husband at this house are quite thin, and have hot furnaces inside their bellies that burn up food at an alarming rate. They need to eat a lot of calories every day. I try to get them to eat "whole" foods like rice cakes instead of chips, but sometimes the husband has to run out and buy things like Nutty Bars and Ruffles just so they can survive.

I only need about 1800 calories a day to maintain my chubbiness. In order to lose 2 pounds a week, I have to cut back to 1400 calories and run. It's true. Sad, but true. However, I will outlast everyone in a famine. I'd be lonely, but alive. Unless they eat me first. Chubby Mommy Stew? I'm sure I would be tender and tasty.

My 14 year old daughter needs to eat about 3,000 calories a day. She's 5'4" and weighs exactly 100 pounds, and growing by the minute. She's vegetarian, so we have to remember to give her good options for good health, since she doesn't like vitamins, isn't fond of soy, or nuts, or most dairy products. She'll eat cheese and eggs and some beans, and fruits and veggies and bread.

It takes a lot of string cheese and tomatoes to get to 3,000 calories. This kid gets hungry, and sometimes she just needs to eat things like cake to get enough wood into her furnace.

Today was one of those days. I made her scones in the morning, she had an orange, a veggie omelet at lunch, popcorn for snack...forget it. She needed more. She spotted a box of cake mix in the back of the pantry, and I showed her how to make chocolate butter cream frosting from scratch.

Two sticks of butter, coco powder, powdered sugar, vanilla and a little milk. She whipped it all together with the mixer until it was light and fluffy. She taste tested it several times, to make sure it was just right, and to fortify her hungry body, since the mixing process alone surely burned up at least 200 calories for her.

The finished product delighted her. "It's easy to eat a lot of this frosting," she said "that store- bought frosting looks good, but after a couple of bites, it's like - ick, I've had enough - but this? I could eat this all day. I can't believe people would even buy that store kind if they knew how to make this homemade kind. Is this what frosting tastes like in heaven?"

Oh yes, they eat this frosting in heaven every day, I think. Even the dogs in heaven can eat this, probably, and not get sick. In fact, I bet my Grandma is feeding all her old dogs chocolate butter cream frosting as we speak. They're all sitting in front of her, ready to do any trick she asks, just for a lick-spoon of perfect fluffy frosting that she made from scratch. I'm sure they don't settle for store-bought frosting in heaven.

We don't go to church, so we get to make up our own ideas about heaven, thank goodness. It's a delicious place, we think. They probably don't even have rice cakes there, and you don't have to run.