Winter Hot Chocolate Recipe

Winter is finally here and the evenings have become dark early and bitterly cold! Even the sunny days  bring a chill!

It's such a family tradition to have hot chocolate in the winter months. We drink it at home in front of the fireplace, we take it on our walks in the forest and we always have it the day we put upon the Christmas tree (along with mulled wine of course)

There are so many variations to making hot chocolate and I am going to be sharing them with you over the next few weeks.

We will start off with the mother recipe. This is what I use as a base for all of our hot chocolate adventures. You can add so many things to this one to change it into something else but for me this is the great staple. You can of course use the powdered variety that you mix with water and milk but where would the fun be in that!

So here goes

Ingredients
2 cups of milk
3/4 a cup of single cream (or double if you are feeling extra decedent)
2 Tbsp of Cocoa
1 Tbsp Dark brown Sugar (any sugar will do)
1/4 Tsp Vanilla Extract

Method
1) In a pan over the stove, heat the milk on a low to medium heat, we don't want to scorch the milk.
2) Add the sugar and the cocoa powder and stir until funny incorporated.
3) Add 1/4 cream and the vanilla extract.
4) With the remaining half cup of cream, whisk/beat in a mixer until it has whipped.
5) Pour hot chocolate into the cup, add on top the whipped cream

There we go! You can tweak each of the ingredients in this to your liking. More cocoa, less sugar, coconut, rice, almond milk etc...

enjoy!