First Post of the Year

And it’s about hot chocolate…

I’d fancied making this vanilla hot chocolate mix ever since I heard about it on Twitter earlier in December. It sounded pretty simple to make. I already had homemade vanilla sugar but not four US cups worth so I only made a quarter of the mix. I also added up both the chocolate quantities into one although I did use two types of chocolate since I had some plain chocolate from a friend for Christmas. The majority of the chocolate I used though was ultra cheap supermarket chocolate and the resulting drink was excellent!

The hardest part was grinding down the chocolate. I used my Kenwood food processor and it still took some time. As the recipe calls, I had roughly chopped the chocolate. In the processor I soon ended up with what resembled chocolate boulders. I pulsed and used a variety of the other speeds. The chocolate ground down but it also compacted under the blade so I had to switch it off and break up the compacted bit with a spoon before running the blade again.

Here’s my reduced quantities.

8 ounces chocolate

1 US cup vanilla sugar

1/2 US cup cocoa (I used Cadbury’s Bournville cocoa)

Even making a small amount still filled this large tin. This is part of a set that Doug bought for me some time ago with a fab cup cake design.

The tin I used to contain my hot chocolate mix

And this is what the resulting mix looks like.

Essentially it looks like something you’d buy in a store.

Epicurious suggests using 1/2-1/3 cup with 8 fluid ounces of milk. I opted for the 1/3 and it was very rich. I still can’t believe how good this was considering the cheap chocolate I used.

I have now given up on trying to get the photos in this post to centre and to stop the text from going where it shouldn’t! Argh! I used to have this problem with Typepad as well.