I'll drink "instant" chocolate mix very happily, but when I decide I'm going to have
proper chocolate, here's my recipe:
Baking Cocoa Powder (I'll use Hershey's, which is pretty good. But I'll prefer
Ghiradelli when I can find it.)
Vanilla Extract (or actual vanilla bean, but they
'spensive, yo!!!)
Sugar
Sea Salt
Water
Whole Milk
Heavy Cream
1.) Amounts...uh...
...
This is the tricky part, and it just takes experimenting. I normally do, perhaps, 1/3 Cup of cocoa powder. Add hot water while stirring to make a "thick paste". Almost like thin cake batter. Add sugar to taste. About 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla. I mix all of this in a small ceramic kettle or ceramic espresso / Turkish coffee pot.
2.) Warm the mixture by boiling water in a larger kettle, then putting the smaller kettle / pot into that. Don't let the chocolate even simmer -- no bubbles! It should just get "hot", and it will become more liquid.
3.) In a third kettle, warm the milk. Again, no boiling or bubbles.
4.) Pour just enough heavy cream into each drinking mug to cover the bottom of the mug (maybe a little more than a tablespoon).
5.) Right before you pull the chocolate mix off the heat, add a dash of sea salt. I use a quarter-sized pile in the palm of my hand...maybe 2/3 of a teaspoon? (Shrugs.) Trick is, don't let the salt "cook", only dissolve.
6.) Add about twice as much chocolate mix as cream. Then fill it up with the warm milk and stir for a while.
That makes about 4 regular coffee mugs. (Warning! the noises people produce may not be appropriate for children.) For Christmas, I often add 1/2 a shot of Peppermint "Flavoring" to each mug at the end. (And a separate, full shot with each cup.
)