A while back I was at the grocery store with Jackson, which is always a mistake. You can take a two-year-old to the store and as the kid is filling your cart with Vienna sausages and L'Oreal Extreme Auburn Red you can express your gratitude for all the help while quietly returning the half-off dented spaghetti cans to the shelf. But a four-year-old shops with more purpose, and may have grown persuasive.
On this particular excursion, while in the dairy section, Jackson started pointing and begging for chocolate milk. And normally I'd be all, "WE HAVE HERSHEY'S SYRUP, I'LL MAKE YOU SOME CHOCOLATE MILK WHEN WE GET HOME." But then I noticed something that would soon become another cobble on my own personal driveway to Hell: the $4.00 half-gallon of Horizon Organic Chocolate Milk.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that this is the best fucking chocolate milk I have ever had in my life and it surely beats the crap out of 2% mixed with syrup. Beats out the crap and renders feeble for the duration.
So it's a few weeks later we're regularly stocked up with the most expensive chocolate milk known to man, but I've started becoming rather nonchalant about where we stand with the regular milk.
Now, normally the anchor of my morning routine is the act of firing up the espresso machine and making some sort of artful combination of coffee and milk, a homegrown cross between a cappuccino and a latte that Jack many years ago dubbed The Fuzzy Coffee.
You see where this is going.
On this particular morning I got back home nearly crippled from yoga (ha ha! not really crippled, but sometimes my hips get opened halfway to the gates of Satan's laundromat and it takes me an hour or so to learn to walk again) and I was humping my way around the kitchen gathering the materials for a fuzzy coffee when I discovered that Jackson had used the last of the regular milk to cut the effects of some particularly fine powdered sugar french toast.
Well, what else would one do in this situation?
One would have no choice but to mix one's espresso with chocolate heroin.
And thus it was that I created the astonishing, creamy, somewhat-too-sweet* but beguilingly named: ChocoLatte.
Smoother than a mocha, yet chocolatier than a latte.
I know, I'm a genius, right? I know, there are probably eleventy-hundred coffee bars in North America that have been making something same or similar for years and it's no suprise to them, but I hadn't heard of it before, and so. Take that, Starbucks! If you steal my idea I will sue, sue, sue.
*After some experimentation I do recommend cutting the chocolate milk with regular milk, or water, in a pinch, but you have to do what's right for you.