Alana
For a few friends and family members, I decided it would be nice to give out homemade hot chocolate mix and marshmallows. What a convenient opportunity to use another Tea Time Treats recipe!
I planned on giving out around 12 or 13 jars (250 ml each), so I did some math and figured out that I would need to spend an unreasonable amount of money on chocolate at either the Duchess Provisions store or Jacek in order to get enough chocolate for my project. Fortunately Mike found a Canadian online baking retailer called Vanilla Food Company, which is seemingly aimed at home bakers who want professional-quality products/ingredients. Turns out they sell the same Valrhona chocolate callets that Duchess uses in their recipe, and at a less unreasonable price. (Win!) So I went ahead and ordered 2 kg of chocolate (caraibe and caramelia). There’s no problem in having extras right?
This was a pretty straightforward recipe, as you essentially put everything in a food processor and hit “on”. Somehow I managed to do a bad job of this making the first recipe (I made 6 in total), because I only put the chocolate in a first. Once my processor was running for a while, I’m assuming, the cocoa butter in the chocolate started to lump everything together again. I added all the other ingredients, which definitely helped prevent the clumping, and resolved to do better for the next batch.
I was a bit disappointed because I got 12 jars of mix out of my 6 batches (2 cups yield per batch), even though the recipe says you should have 2 ¼ cups yield (aka 1 ½ jars of mix I didn’t get!) If I was just making a single batch for myself this would be fine, but it was a bit of an annoyance as I was really aiming for a large volume.
Anyways, I really enjoyed sipping on the hot chocolate from this recipe. It definitely has some similarities to sipping chocolate, but isn’t quite as thick/rich. Apparently not everybody is a fan of this mix because of the spices, but I find it to be quite enjoyable and would actually consider adding more spice in the future (no cinnamon?!)
Duchess Hot Chocolate Mix
Ingredients
- 175 g (1 ¼ cup) dark chocolate
- 100 g (¾ cup) milk chocolate
- 30 g (¼ cup) cocoa powder
- 3 tbsp granulated sugar
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- ¼ tsp all spice
- pinch ground cardamom
- pinch salt
Directions
- Put everything into a food processor and let it run until mostly uniform. It’s okay to have some chunks of chocolate.
- To Make the hot chocolate, stir 4 tbsp of mix into 250 ml (1 cup) of milk until melted. Enjoy 🙂
Chateau Gateau 