Gemma's ultimate hot chocolate recipe featuring frozen whipped cream

Hi Bold Bakers, I am really excited for this episode because it is our first ever behind the scenes look at the making of a Bigger Bolder Baking episode. I'm going to make my best ever hot chocolate and frozen whipped cream and I'm going to share with you how I pick my recipes and we're going to go all the way through to food photography. Now this bonus video is sponsored by Chromebooks and I would like to say a big thank you to them for making it possible. Okay our first step is to pick our recipe. So I have my Chromebook here, it powers up straight away, so what I'm gonna do is go to BiggerBolderBaking.com because that's where everybody should go to get their baking recipes. Thing about it is I already have a hot chocolate recipe on here. So this is a good recipe but I want to turn it into Gemma's best ever hot chocolate recipe so I need to make some adjustments to it. Okay so this hot chocolate recipe calls for milk but I am going to go even further than that and I am going to scratch out half of the milk and I'm going to add in cream as well because that's what's going to make it really rich. Now down here I have written milk chocolate, but what's going to make this hot chocolate really killer is a 72% cocoa chocolate. So something that's a little bit bitter and sweet will work perfectly. Now I have sugar written here but I'm going to scratch that out because you don't need sugar when there's already sugar in the chocolate, and I'm going to write optional beside vanilla extract because you can put that in if you want or not, that's totally up to you. Okay so now I've got my hot chocolate recipe ready to go, our first step is we're gonna make our frozen cream. So into your bowl pour in some heavy whipping cream, and then add a little bit of sugar for sweetness. Now you can use any type of cream at all that will whip up nice and thick. Then we're gonna take our hand mixer and all you want to do is just whip it up until it's nice and stiff. And you can even do this by hand. Hello Ira. Where did you come from? You realize you're in my shop? She's doing my job. How's it looking? How's it looking? Now it's the holidays so if you want to get a little bit festive, you can always add in a little bit of Cointreau into this cream as well and that will make it taste so good. This recipe is so easy and it makes such a nice addition to your homemade hot chocolate. Okay this cream is looking good, now we're gonna take this and put it into a baking tray. So here I have a tray lined with parchment and I'm just gonna go ahead and spread out all my lovely whipped cream. Now I'm not gonna spread it out too thin, I'm gonna keep it nice and thick because we're We're going to take this once it's frozen and cut it out and get lovely big chunks of frozen cream. It's gonna be delicious. Okay, this is looking good. Time to put it into the freezer. It only takes around an hour to freeze and while that's in there we're gonna get started on our hot chocolate. Okay, cut. That looks great. So in between takes we like to reset, Olivia helps me bring in all of my other ingredients. And I also like to go onto the Spotify app and play some music. it's the holidays, we're gonna put on something a little bit more festive. Okay, we're all set, are you? Oh are you ready? It's fast. Yeah. Okay, I'm ready. So we're gonna start out in a heavy bottom saucepan to make our hot chocolate. Go ahead and add in your chocolate, cream, and milk. Then turn the heat on to medium low, and just let the chocolate melt away until it starts to simmer. So while our hot chocolate is bubbling away, I have some cream that I already froze that's ready to be cut out. So here I have some festive cutters, as you can imagine I have no shortage of these, I have like hundreds of them. And what I'm going to do is just cut out your shapes of cream. So then just imagine when these go on top of hot chocolate, how pretty they look. Then you also get the nice contrast of the hot hot chocolate and the cold frozen cream. You can do any shape you like, if you have star cutters, anything at all. Once all your cream is cut out, we're gonna pop it back into the freezer and make sure it's nice and cold, ready for our hot chocolate. Okay so it's been a few minutes and our hot chocolate is starting to simmer, now you do want it to come to a simmer because it actually thickens up the chocolate, and as you can see here, this is the kind of chocolate that gets really thick. And that's what makes it the best ever hot chocolate. So just a few more stirs, and our hot chocolate is done. So this hot chocolate is looking perfect, our frozen cream is ready to go, I'm just gonna send a quick message to Kevin on Slack to let him know that we're ready to start photography. So a huge part of Bigger Bolder Baking and my favorite part is the food photography. But you probably don't know that myself and Olivia have to hustle really fast to get the photos done before we taste anything because the food has to be looking in tip top shape. So Olivia comes in and she makes a beautiful decoration just like she's doing right here. Lovely, some candy canes, some marshmallows. We're very fortunate that here we get a lot of natural light which is really great for photography. So we take photos. Now one really important thing is the thumbnail for YouTube, because we need that to be killer so you guys click on it every single Thursday. So I'm gonna upload these to Google Drive so I can edit them on the go. Okay my photos are uploaded and they're ready for me to edit on the go, which is exactly what I need. And I finally get to taste my hot chocolate after all of that work, oh man. You know what this is? The reason I call this best ever is because it is rich, it is not too sweet, it is stick to your ribs kind of hot chocolate, that's perfect for winter. I absolutely love this recipe and I really hope you try it out. Thanks again to Chromebooks for this bonus video and for more information about Chromebooks, click the link in the description box below this video. And I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking. Cheers!