How To Make The Best Hot Chocolate CORRECTLY

Hello there! I am very excited today. We are two weeks away from Christmas and we are making some hot chocolate. Not your standard hot chocolate. We are going full out Parisian drinking chocolate. I'm very excited. There will be coffee involved. Without further ado, let's begin! Tray time! Now I have a lot of things in front of me. This is going to be a very decadent, very dessert-like chocolate. We're going to talk through the recipe here. This video I'll show you how to make it, but if you would like all of those written instructions, you can go to morgandrinkscoffee.com or you can sign up for my newsletter, Coffee for Here, which will also include this recipe. So many places you can find it, but let's see what we have on the tray. First things first, of course, is going to be our chocolate. This recipe is going to make between two to three servings and we are going to be using about 10 ounces or about 270 grams of dark chocolate. I like to use anything over 70% dark chocolate, but to your taste, of course. We are going to be needing some dairy products today. This is not going to be a vegan recipe. We will be using whole milk and we will also be using cream. About 400 mils of whole milk, about 100 mils of heavy cream, about 30 grams of powdered sugar, one gram of whole cloves, and a cinnamon stick, a little drip drop of vanilla extract. Here's where our coffee comes in. Now I'm using a slightly different form than we usually talk about or use on this channel. This is going to be a freeze-dried instant espresso powder. In this recipe, I want to add the flavor of coffee, not as a flavor, but as an enhancement for the chocolate. But I also don't want to add like a lot of water or liquid to this recipe, so we're going to go with an instant. About 2.5 grams here. The last thing is going to be an orange, which we'll use the zest of as garnish later. We will be a whipped cream to go on this chocolate. I don't have all those ingredients out right now. We'll talk about that when we get to it. But let me get our pan set up. I'm so excited to make this. I'll be right back. I want to give a huge thank you to Trade for sponsoring today's video. As many of you know, Trade is the U.S.'s number one specialty coffee marketplace, with coffees hand-selected from local roasters all over the country. Your coffee subscription can be tailored to fit your needs, from different roast profiles to your exact delivery schedule. However, it is also the holiday season, and if you're looking to finish up your shopping list, a personalized coffee subscription could be the perfect gift, whether it's a full year, six months, or three months of coffee. A subscription is, and I know this is cheesy, the gift that quite literally keeps on giving. From light and bright to dark and bold, Trade's personalized coffee subscriptions deliver incredible coffee directly from roasters to your loved one's front door. It's like gifting them a tour of the country's best coffee shops without leaving home. So, if you're ready to knock some names off your shopping list, Trade has got you covered with the gift of great coffee. Visit drinktrade.com.mdc to get started on your holiday shopping. That's drinktrade.com.mdc or the top link in the description. The first thing we're going to do is to break up all of this chocolate into nice, manageably meltable pieces, is what I was trying to say. Get this all out on a tray or cutting board, which is very nice. I'm using a knife here. I'm just kind of giving this a rough chop. I'm not looking for these all to be teeny tiny pieces. I just want something a good bit smaller and all homogenous in size so that they melt at a similar rate. Okay, most of my pieces are about this size or smaller. Push that all off to the side. Now for my favorite part of any recipe, which is putting things into a saucepan. I'm gonna put this on about medium, medium to high heat. We'll add our whole milk, our heavy cream, the vanilla extract. I'm kind of eyeballing here. If you are in the U.S. and I'm so sorry for this measurement, I'm using about a quarter teaspoon. Basically, I'm about halfway filling up the cap. It's really a dash. We'll add in our powdered sugar, our instant coffee. I'm gonna put our spices into this little tea ball right here. You can use like a paper tea sachet if you would like instead. Just something that will make them easy to remove when we're done with them. In go our cloves. I'm just gonna kind of break up the cinnamon stick. Close that back up. Now we are going to gently stir these initial ingredients together as our milk begins to heat up. You'll see the milk take on this kind of light beige color as that coffee gets incorporated. Once everything is pretty well mixed together, I'm gonna just kind of rest in our little spice sachet we've made here. You don't really have to constantly stir here. I would keep an eye on it. I would let it move every like minute or so. What we are waiting for is till the milk gets just under a simmer. When we start to see a little bit of movement, a little bit of bubbling around the edges, that's when our next action will take place. So I'm gonna keep watching this, gently stirring, then we'll come back. It's about four to five minutes later and I can tell we are just about to reach that kind of slight milk movement around the edges. There is steam rising off so let's get ready for our next step. First thing I'm gonna do is remove our little spice infuser. This has had a nice amount of time to add some Christmas spice into everything. I'm now also going to get a hot pad ready because we are going to be doing some transferring between the heat that it's on and between the hot pad. I'm about ready to start loading in all of this chocolate I have waiting on the side. This feels like a lot of chocolate and it is. Oh gosh, and allow yourself enough time to wash your hands. Okay, as that milk is just under a simmer, begin gently stirring in that chocolate and you'll see it pretty immediately start to melt. Now if you see any large bubbles start to pop up, if you see that simmer actually begin to start, that's when we're going to move it off the heat and just gently keep stirring everything together. This melting and stirring process is probably going to take about five minutes in total and there may be points where you doubt it. Some of those smaller pieces of chocolate take a good bit to melt and fully emulsify into everything. You'll kind of see this sort of like speckled phase for a good while here. You didn't do anything wrong, just keep stirring, keep moving it on and off heat, you'll be totally fine. Really what we're doing here is we're just making a drinking ganache more so than anything else. However, what is really really lovely about this drinking hot chocolate is we have some complementary flavors in here that are overall just going to boost and balance out our final drink. Chocolate and coffee are pretty intrinsically linked both in their supply chains but also in their flavor profiles. We have mochas, we have all sorts of chocolate coffee pairings out in the world because chocolate and coffee enhance one another. So we're not using a ton of coffee in this however the presence of it is going to really really amplify what we get out of the chocolate. Such a such a happy little relationship in the cup. Okay we'll come off the heat for just a little bit. You can really start to feel it thicken up in here. This feels like Christmas Eve or perhaps Christmas morning type of beverage. And now I've brought my temperature down to a low for this final pass. We are again close to about five minutes into our process here. It has definitely thickened up quite a bit. You can start to see it looking a lot smoother than it did when we first began. Our drinking hot chocolate at this point is functionally done. However, we are going to go full Parisian French hot chocolate and we are going to make a really soft whipped cream to pair with this. So at this point everything is nice and toasty. We can set it off on this hot pad and let's make some whipped cream. Okay for our whipped cream we are going to use a lot of the same ingredients that we used for our hot chocolate. So I have heavy cream here obviously. We're going to be using a little bit more of that instant espresso powder. We're going to be using our vanilla extract. And then my favorite kind of sugar for whipped cream is again powdered sugar. This is kind of a make however much you need sort of scenario. We have got a lot of sweetness, a lot of richness in this hot chocolate here. So I'm not going to go very sweet with this. This is more to kind of balance to cool and to cut that dark chocolate flavor. Measure with your heart on that vanilla once more. And then just a just a speckling of instant espresso. And then go to town on it. I'll be back shortly. I'll be the first to admit that I like a pretty stiff whipped cream but I feel like this is a this is a pretty good job that I did here. We are going to be placing this into a very hot liquid so melting is going to happen. With everything made let us assemble one of the tastiest hot chocolates I've ever had. And you know you've done it right when it is spilling off the side. I think perhaps we'll approach this with a spoon first. This is truly truly a decadent treat. I'll take the blame for over spilling this drink. Let's sip from the cup. There are not words for this. This is this is indescribable in how tasty it is. This is a rich drink for sure. I've definitely poured myself like six ounces and probably don't think I could drink more than four. But that being said, this is truly a decadent treat. And you can find the recipe on morgandrinkscoffee.com or in my newsletter Coffee which I'll include the sign up for both in the description and probably the pinned comment as well. But in the meantime I'm gonna I'm gonna go enjoy this in the privacy of being off camera because this is both very delicious but also very messy. So until next time my name is Morgan. You can find me here on YouTube once a week plus shorts or on Instagram or TikTok every single day. I'm gonna go take this and be very very uh indelicate with it. So until next time I'll see y'all later. Have a good day everyone.