This drinking cocoa was inspired during our time in Germany. German are known for their festivals, and yes, they have a chocolate festival. We attended the chololART Festival in Tübingen. We saw anything and everything you could possibly make our of chocolate! Shoes, instruments, truffles, bars, decorations…you name it, it was made out of chocolate!
And at this festival, we discovered drinking cocoa. It’s different from the hot cocoa we grew up with, that powdered concoction that always tasted a little ‘thin’! This was rich and smooth, flavorful and decadent. We fell in love and decided we had to make this beautiful concoction ourselves. They key to this delightful drink is the chocolate! We choose to use Ritter Sport dark chocolate bars as the base for our drinking cocoa and we tend to go very dark for our chocolate. We also chose this because while we lived in Germany, we were only 20 minutes away from the Ritter Sport factory Waldenbuch. So it was easy to get either there or any of the groceries around our home. We began using 50% dark chocolate, but then Ritter Sport came out with this intense 74% dark chocolate and we love it more! You can use whatever chocolate you prefer, just keep in mind that milk and semi-sweet chocolate already have sugar in them, so you may want to cut back on the sugar you use while making the syrup.
You’ll begin this recipe by making a chocolate syrup from scratch. You’ll melt the chocolate over low heat, then add sugar and water. Once that boils just a couple minutes to create your syrup, you’ll begin adding the dairy. You’ll notice that we use full fat dairy, if you’re going to enjoy drinking cocoa, you’re not looking for low calories, right? I have not experimented with non-dairy options, so I can’t guarantee how that would turn out, but low fat milk does just fine. You will NOT add the vanilla until after the cocoa has come to just under boil and you’ve turned off the heat.
Duncan Drinking Cocoa
Ingredients
- 8 ounces dark chocloate The dark chocolate makes this rich, if you use milk chocolate, cut back on the sugar or it may be too sweet
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup water Tap water is fine
- 2 cups half and half
- 5-1/2 cups whole milk
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Place stock pot over low heat, melt chocolate, do not boil
- Pour sugar and water over melted chocolate. Whisk this together until bubbling. Allow to bubble (boil) for 2 minutes.
- Increase heat to low/medium, pour in half and half until blended
- Stir in whole milk, stir routinely to avoid burning milk
- Once drinking chocolate is steaming (do not boil), turn off heat, and stir in vanilla extract.
- Pour into cups and top with marshmallows, whipped cream, or even mix in peppermint schnapps! Enoy