Hot cocoa

[OK, so it seems a bit oxymoronic (or perhaps just moronic) given the warm weather Sydney has been experiencing lately, but this evening I had a massive craving for hot chocolate – which of course inspired me to try and come up with a F4L-friendly equivalent. It took a couple of tries to achieve something I was happy with (how I suffered through the experimental phase, but I was thinking only of you, dear reader!), but the below is the result...]

Serves: 1
Preparation time: 5 mins

Ingredients

• 1 cup rice milk (you’ll want to use a brand which has a sweeter flavour as you won’t be adding sugar to this recipe – I used Vitasoy Rice Milk Original which worked beautifully)
• 2 tsp cocoa

Method

1. Spoon the cocoa into a mug.
2. Add a little hot water (hot tap water is fine – no need to turn on the kettle) – just enough to make a loose paste (we’re thinking somewhere between the Clag-brand lumpy paste glue that those of my generation spent our first school years sticking coloured bits of paper to other coloured bits of paper with, and water) – and whisk until all lumps are dissolved.
3. Pour in the milk and stir thoroughly.
4. Whack the mug in the microwave for about 2 minutes (times will vary depending on your microwave – may take a little experimenting to get the milk hot enough but not so hot that you’re going to spend the next 10 minutes wiping spilled-over cocoa out of the microwave’s nooks and crannies).

Enjoy. :)

Notes

• I found the rice milk I used so sweet that it took me two teaspoons of cocoa to come up with something sufficiently “chocolate-y”. Obviously if you’re using a milk like soy or another brand of rice milk which is a little less sweet you might need to down your cocoa input to offset this.
• I also made up a couple of cups’ worth of cocoa up to step 3 and then stored the result in a glass jug in the fridge so I could indulge my sweet tooth with a little chocolate milk when the urge arose.
• When the weather gets a little cooler, I’m thinking I might try this recipe with just a dash of chilli to see if I can find an equivalent to the chilli chocolates I have tried and loved in the past… Will post the results...