Warm up to January with a cup of cocoa the Century Farmhouse way!
Ann Marie Craig • January 22, 2021
Do you dream of a rich cup of cocoa - not too sweet - and a cozy afternoon? Click on the link below for the downloadable recipe page. Isn't January wonderful?
Since January is one of my favorite months of the year (I LOVE winter!), I want to share my favorite cozy cocoa recipe with you so you can warm up to the postcard prettiness of the snow and the snappy nip of chilly air. I deliberately take an hour at the end of my day to step outside on my snowshoes and spend some quality time with snowflakes and icicles. Then I come back inside to warm, cozy jammies, a snuggly blanket, a good book, and a cup of not-too-sweet cocoa.
Let me see that Cocoa Recipe!
When our girls were small, we'd make a big pitcher of homemade, cook-it-on-the-stovetop cocoa that we'd use for chilly morning breakfasts and end of day warm-ups from October to April. There is nothing quite like the comfort of warm cocoa, don't you agree? I'd mix cocoa powder and sugar and a dash of cinnamon with water to make a thick syrup, and add creamy milk to the pot, then pour it in the cocoa pitcher so we could help ourselves to a lovely chocolate drink easily warmed in the microwave later.
The girls are quite grown up now and a full pitcher of cocoa can sometimes languish in the fridge if we don't make it a point to have a cup every day or so. So I created a recipe for a cocoa mix that is not as sweet as commercial mixes, but dissolves as easily as they do in your cup of hot milk. The trick is to use superfine baker's sugar (or caster sugar if you're in Europe), and use a bit less sugar in proportion to the cocoa powder you add to the mix. I also like to use a high quality cocoa powder, but in truth, nearly any cocoa powder will work as long as it is unsweetened when you buy it. You can enhance the flavor of the cocoa by treating the mix as you would a flavored sugar, so why not add a bit of vanilla bean and/or a dried anise star to the cocoa jar? Mmmmm. You can also make store-bought marshmallows into a fancy treat: just slice off the very outer layer of the marshmallow to make a sticky cube and toss in a teaspoon of the cocoa mix to coat.
Click on the link below for the recipe:
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