I once took a college level creative writing class.  It was during the time when Ben and I were still dating.  The woman who taught the class wanted us to dig deep, contemplate, and talk about our feelings. It was one of those classes that if you showed up, wrote some stuff down, and acted like you were really interested in getting in touch with your inner artist you were automatically going to get an A. During one class period she brought the class coffee, doughnuts, and OJ (for the people who didn’t drink coffee).  We all sat in a circle after reading a famous essay and discussed how we felt about it.  It struck me as hilarious at the time.  I told Ben about it and from that point on the phrase “coffee and doughnuts” was how we would describe to each other the level of difficulty a class may or may not be.  For instance if you put college classes on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the easiest then we would say 1 is a “coffee and doughnuts” level class.

And whenever one of us would begin a new course the other would ask, “Is it going to be hard?”  Invariably the answer would be  something like, “It’s totally going to be coffee and doughnuts!”  or “It’s not going to be coffee and doughnuts but I’ll get through it OK.”

There are both coffee and hazelnuts “in” these doughnuts by the way.

*For the frosting I used a version of Cookies and Cups: 2 Ingredient White Chocolate Buttercream.  I used 2-4 oz. Ghirardelli white chocolate bars (instead of the white chocolate chips).  I don’t know if it was the wrong chocolate or if I over beat it but it didn’t end up super fluffy.  For these doughnuts it worked great though because I was able to dip them in the buttercream and the flavor was as outstanding as the original.