Sweet dreams guaranteed!
Hot chocolate on a cold winter night will make your snuggle with your Valentine much more enjoyable...
Mix cocoa, sugar and milk. Heat up, then top with whipped cream and add a chocolate leaf!
It is popularly thought that the Mayans created the first chocolate beverage about 2000 years ago. The Aztecs made a few changes to the Mayan recipes - sometimes adding vanilla and other spices. Though Cortes brought a cold chocolate drink recipe back to Spain in 1528, supplies of cocoa beans were astronomically expensive and the drink had limited popularity. Hot chocolate as we know it today was developed in the early 17th century, when the Spanish modified the Aztec recipe for xocolatl by removing the chili peppers, adding cane sugar and heating the mixture. Milk was added by the English towards the end of that century.
In the 19th century the Dutch developed a method of separating the cocoa butter from the cocoa solids. Since then chocolate drinks have usually been made without the cocoa butter. So modern hot chocolate has only the fat present in the milk used to make it. Some people prefer to reduce the calories by making hot chocolate with water or skim milk. Others go so far as to replace the sweetener with a diet sweetener or omit it entirely - thus resurrecting the Mayan recipe.
Spices served with hot chocolate include cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom and nutmeg.
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