Do your kids love hot chocolate?
Have you looked at the ingredients? Let me tell you it’s not pretty!
You’ll find words like corn syrup, hydrogenated and processed (as in processed whey). Nothing that’s good for you or even a healthy treat. It’s really food you should stay away from, even children–especially children.
My kids and my husband LOVE hot chocolate. And I love them enough to make them REAL hot chocolate, you know the heat the milk over the stove and melt the chocolate or stir in the cocoa kind. The real stuff takes a few minutes to make because you have to gather everything and measure it all out.
So I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have it already mixed? Then as my kids have gotten older I really love the idea of them doing as much on their own as possible. So I developed a recipe for them to heat their own milk and then whisk in my All Natural Hot Cocoa Mix.
Friends and family love it so much that one year I decided to make up some and give it as a gift. That’s how I found out it makes a great gift and you can save money by making it yourself.
All Natural Hot Cocoa Mix
You will need
- 1 pint (16 oz) jar
- 1 cup sucanat
- ½ cup good quality chocolate chips
- ½ cup organic cocoa powder
- 2 teaspoons vanilla powder
Combine all ingredients in a food processor and blend for 60 seconds (less if you’d like chunks of chocolate chips visible for presentation).
Pour the mixture into a 1-pint jar and label and wrap as a gift or keep for a cold winter’s night.
To make hot chocolate:
Heat milk in a pot over the stove. Pour a small amount of milk into a mug with the cocoa powder – 1 ½ to 3 tablespoons of mix per 1 cup of milk. Then whisk. Add milk a little at a time until hot cocoa is smooth and creamy! The trick is to add the milk slowly to the cocoa so it will dissolve without lumps.
Variations and additions
You can use dark chocolate for the chocolate chips and cocoa powder in this recipe, but keep in mind that all chocolate but especially dark chocolate has caffeine so it might not be the best drink in the evening especially for kids.
Instead of vanilla powder, you can use scrape out the vanilla beans from one vanilla pod. Be sure to keep the vanilla pod and stick it in your vanilla infused sugar.
You can also use any organic sugar of choice. I believe the sucanat give the cocoa an extra rich taste, but if you have a hard time finding it you can use another high-quality sugar.
Of course, it’s hard to drink hot chocolate without marshmallows, another hard to read ingredient label in most cases. I recommend these marshmallows, they are a holdover from my families vegan days. No need to hold up your nose with these. Trust me, your kids will love them. I have to hide them when I buy them or my children will devour them. Best of all they have an easy, dare I say, enjoyable label to read.
