The Smoothest, Silkiest Homemade Hot Chocolate

Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make homemade hot chocolate. Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here, and today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well-researched, and perfected recipe. Today's recipe is super simple, but I did think it deserved a video because with my recipe, I set out to avoid one of the main problems that I've found in many conventional hot chocolate recipes. In so many recipes, the chocolate separates, you end up with little gritty bits of chocolate, and I did not want that for my recipe. I am so pleased to be sharing a smooth, rich, creamy hot chocolate, no gritty bits remaining, so let's go ahead and get to it. So for today's recipe, let's head over to the stovetop, where you're just going to need a small saucepan. I am making hot chocolate for two today, but this recipe can easily be scaled up or scaled down as needed. Now, the first ingredient you need is 4 ounces of chocolate. While you can make this recipe with chocolate chips, I highly recommend using a premium chocolate, whether it's chocolate bars or what I'm using today, which is couverture chocolate. Couverture, I always say it a little bit funny, but you do want to use a nice chocolate that you would enjoy eating. I am using a dark chocolate today, and I want to note that if you use anything sweeter, like semi-sweet, you are going to probably want to reduce your sugar by just a little bit. I'm going to add this chocolate to my saucepan. I'm also going to add 2 tablespoons of firmly packed light brown sugar. You can substitute granulated if you'd like. I just like the little extra flavor that brown sugar adds. And we will add 1 1⁄2 cup of heavy cream. I'm going to ultimately be using a blend of heavy cream and milk today. The little bit of cream helps make this nice and rich, while the milk keeps it from being too rich, but we'll get to the milk later, don't—you don't need that yet. All right, now grab yourself a whisk and turn your stovetop heat to low, and we are going to whisk together these ingredients pretty much constantly until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is nice and smooth. Slowly heating these ingredients, waiting to add the milk, and whisking pretty much constantly over a low heat is critical to getting that nice and smooth chocolate I mentioned. Really shouldn't take too long, just a couple minutes, but just have a little bit of patience. All right, so this is looking beautiful. It looks a lot like a ganache at this point. It's silky smooth, perfectly melted. So now let's grab our milk. You're going to need 1 1⁄2 cups of whole milk for today's recipe, and we're just going to add it gradually. I'm going to start with just a slow drizzle while I'm still whisking, and then I'm going to pause and whisk in that milk. Once I have it nicely whisked in, I'm just going to add a little bit more. Now you want to do this slowly so that it slowly is heated with the chocolate and you have a nice smooth mixture. Have a little bit of patience. That's all you need. You do want to make sure it's warm. If you hold your hand over the hot chocolate, you should be able to feel heat coming off of it. If you've added your milk too quickly, you may not have given it enough time to warm up and you could end up with cold hot chocolate. So you want to make sure it's warm or hot. All right, once you have added all of your milk and your mixture is nice and smooth, we can go ahead and take this off the heat. And we just have two more ingredients left to add. I like to add 1⁄4 teaspoon of vanilla extract, which adds such a nice flavor. And we're also going to add just a pinch of salt. If you have sea salt, I recommend that. But as you can see, I'm taking a very small bit and just sprinkling that in. All right, now go ahead and grab yourself a mug and let's go ahead and pour that out. And obviously you cannot have hot chocolate without marshmallows. Let's add a couple of those. And that is how you make the perfect cup of homemade hot chocolate. I hope you guys enjoyed today's recipe. And if you try this one out, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think. I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time. That's good.