Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Today is my friend Laura's birthday. Happy Birthday Laura!! Our friend Kelly hosted a lunch pizza party at her house to celebrate. It was so fun--good friends, pizza and watermelon and veggies and breadsticks for lunch. It ended on a low note with the boy having an accident in his underwear (thanks again, Kelly!! You're a SAINT!), but other than that it was quite enjoyable. Anyway, I had signed up to take cupcakes. But when I looked at the Evite yesterday, there were 34 people including kids, so I figured my one box of cake mix wouldn't cover everyone, so I opted for a 9x13 cake instead. I don't like store bought frosting (have you ever looked at the ingredient list on those?! Yuck!!), so I looked up recipes to make my own. I have a chocolate cream cheese frosting that I LOVE, but I didn't have enough powdered sugar for it. Turns out I didn't have enough powdered sugar for any of the frosting recipes I found. So I looked on RecipeZaar.com for one that I could use. I had two cups of powdered sugar, and everything I was finding called for three or more. Finally I found one that got good reviews and used just the amount of sugar I had on hand. It was meant to be.

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
Recipe #44126
1/3 cup butter, softened
2 1/4 cups confectioners' sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1/3 cup milk
1 1/4 teaspoons vanilla

Place butter in a bowl and beat until creamy. Add sugar and cocoa, mixing well. Stir in milk in portions, stirring each time. Add vanilla. Spread on cooled cake or other items needing frosting.

*****

This. Was. Yummy. Everyone at the party really liked it. It was super easy to mix together and all the ingredients are things I normally have on hand. The original recipe on the website was for 3-3/4 cups frosting, but you can change the amount you need and it automatically recalculates everything for you. How cool is that?! So I played around with amounts until I got one that matched how much powdered sugar I had.