Episode 053 How To Make Hot Chocolate

Intro: Welcome everybody to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host, Susie Weinrich. 

Susie Weinrich: All right, we have a little extra special bonus episode for you today. This is not a dinner recipe. Since we are headed right into winter, I thought I would come on and do a little hot chocolate recipe. I am all for a really good shortcut in the kitchen. Really good marinara sauce, a really good refrigerated pesto, really good refrigerated pico de gallo you can get at the store. Packaged hot chocolate, it’s fine. But if you’ve ever had homemade hot chocolate that has a really rich, deep chocolate flavor and has a thicker texture, it’s almost like drinking chocolate, you won’t go back to the packaged stuff. It’s super, super easy. If you have a well-stocked baking cabinet, most likely you can actually make hot chocolate any day, especially on a snow day. This will be an extra special treat. If you have some teens in your house that maybe are feeling a little bit too old to go make a snowman outside, you can leave them inside and they can make this hot chocolate for everybody. They’ll love it. It’s a great little snow day project for the older kids. 

Tips and Tricks: So there is one ingredient that you may not have in your baking cabinet already, and it’s powdered milk. It’s kind of an odd ingredient, but it definitely makes this hot chocolate recipe extra creamy and rich. You can find powdered milk usually in the baking aisle, and it’s probably going to be on one of the bottom shelves. It will either be in a box or in a canister. The one I have is just from Target. It’s on the bottom shelf. It comes in a box, and then there’s three pouches in the box. So look for that at your store and pick it up, and then you can just keep it in your baking cabinet. When you’re ready to make this hot chocolate, you’ll probably have all the ingredients you need.

Homemade Hot Chocolate Recipe: To get started, you’re going to need three cups of milk. In the recipe, I recommend whole milk just because it’s extra creamy and rich, but you can definitely use a 2% if that’s what you have. So in a small saucepan, you’re going to get that warming over medium low heat. While that warms together, you’re going to whisk together a quarter cup of powdered milk, a quarter cup of unsweetened cocoa powder and three tablespoons of powdered sugar. Whisk that together until it comes together and there’s no clumps or anything. Then once that milk is warm on the stove top, you’re going to slowly whisk that cocoa mixture into the warm milk and keep whisking until it is smooth and fully combined. Then you’re going to pour in one cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips into that warm milk cocoa mixture and stir until they’re completely melted and incorporated. Remove that from the heat, and that’s it. That is your hot chocolate. It is super simple and is so much better than the package stuff. I hate saying that because it feels snooty, but it really is. It really is better than just the package stuff, I promise. 

So this recipe will fill two mugs completely. Or to be honest, what I find is that when I pour hot cocoa for the kids, they generally don’t drink the whole cup anyway. So I would pour it into three cups, filling it about two thirds of the way full, and then leave the rest of the room for the kids to pour on all their toppings. We’re not having hot cocoa every day, so let them go crazy with their toppings. 

Some of the things that I like to have for the kids to add in are, of course marshmallows, mini marshmallows, whipped cream, maybe some chocolate sauce, maybe some extra cocoa powder or powdered sugar in a little shaker. For the adults you could add a little boozy note to your hot cocoa. So some things that would be really good are Peppermint Schnapps, Baileys, maybe Kahlua. RumChata is probably my favorite. It has a cinnamon and cream flavor to it. You could do whipped cream vodka, marshmallow vodka. Fireball or just a chocolate liqueur to add a little bit more chocolate flavor.

So I hope that this hot cocoa recipe warms up your next snow day. Of course, I will link the full recipe right in the show notes for you so you can find it when you’re ready to make your homemade hot chocolate. 

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Outro: All right. Usually at the end I say, I hope this recipe makes your dinner time easier, but since this isn’t for dinner, I guess we’ll just see you later.