I love hot chocolate. A warm fireplace, snow outside, a hike through the chilly autumn woods, all require hot chocolate as far as I am concerned.
There's a problem, I love the convenience and taste of instant hot chocolate, but they all contain trace amounts of trans fat. I'm not going to get into my trans fat rant now, but if for starters look here, here, and for a nice unbiased view, here. The point is, there are a bunch of foods like hot cocoa that say they have 0 trans fat, but actually don't. I don't like that, so I'm avoiding those foods.
So, for a while I was just making my own hot cocoa. It's not that hard; you boil some water with cocoa, add some milk, sugar, etc., etc., and in 15-20 minutes you're done.
But that's 15-20minutes. Do you know how long it takes me to make instant hot cocoa? At work, where we have a hot water dispenser, it's on the order of 1 minute. A savings of 19 possible minutes. That's enough time for an Arrested Develpment episode. Consequently, my hot cocoa consumption has dramatically decreased.
But no longer. In a stroke of genius, I mixed together all of the ingredients of my favorite hot cocoa (a la Cook's Illustrated), and added DRY MILK! You should have this on hand already if you're a bread maker (it makes for a nice, soft crumb in certain types of bread). You add enough dry milk to make up the recipe, omit the vanilla (I'm still trying to figure out how to get this back in) and you have a very good, very cheap hot cocoa mix. Put it in a plastic bag (I even mixed it in the bag) and add a label: JUST ADD WATER!
Hot Cocoa Mix
Makes 4-1 cup servings
6 tablespoons Dutch-processed cocoa
4 heaping tablespoons sugar
Small pinch salt
1 cup dry milk (I used nonfat, it was still good)
1. Mix in plastic bag and shake. Really people, it doesn't get any easier.
2. Use ~4 Tbs mix for each cup of hot water.
That's it. All done. The best part: You can make your own flavored cocoa. Just add any dry ingredients. I'd like to make one with cinnamon and ancho chile pepper; my mouth is watering just thinking about it. How about very finely crushed candy canes for peppermint? Does it get any more Christmas?
I would absolutely love to hear peoples' other flavor ideas, as well as a way to get the vanilla back in. The only two ways I can think of is making flavored sugar (which seems overly complicated), or crushed tic-tacs (which I don't think would taste very good).
(Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.)
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