How to make hot chocolate in the microwave

Or you can just use the kind that goes in after the heated liquid (in my case, milk):

1. Fill a cup with milk.
2. Add you favourite brand of hot chocolate mixture.
3. Microwave for 90 seconds.

A lot easier :-)

Awwww … you’re all wimps! big grin To make hot chocolate properly you have got to start with COCOA POWDER. Don’t use some pre-mix. In my country (UK) these mixes are usually 80% sugar and 20% cocoa plus a bit of emulsifier to make the mix dissolve easily. While such a mix makes a drinkable drink, it really needs more cocoa in it. Something like 40%.

So I propose that the Mark II revision of making hot chocolate in the microwave goes like this:

(1) Make an oversized quantity of cocoa in a small quantity of boiling water. Don’t use milk as it can be hard to work with. And ignore all the manufacturer’s suggestions on the cocoa tin that you use cold water. (I wonder why so many manufacturers get it wrong as cocoa powder does not disperse properly in cold water.) Instead make it with boiling water or use hot milk. Personally, I find it easier to boil a kettle and use that water.

(2) As you do step 1, you should warm the cup up. (Personally I like to use a glass tumbler as I like to see the drink through the side!). You use steps 1 to 3 in your description to do this but if you have used hot water, as I suggest, then all you need to do is pour the hot water in the cup before you start to make the cocoa & water mix. Just let the hot water remain there until the mix is ready.

(3) When the cocoa & water mix and the heated mug are ready, pour away the hot water out of the mug and pour milk into it and heat it up to about 60 degrees C in the microwave. (My microwave has a temperature probe to get this dead right but careful timing and experimentation is as good. Anyway the temperature will continue to rise a bit after the microwave has stopped.) If you overheat the milk you will get a skim on the top and not everyone likes to have that in their drink. I don’t.

(4) Take the hot milk out of the microwave and add three or four teaspoons of cocoa mix. You may need to add more if you have used a more water to disperse the cocoa than I use. Or maybe you just like the taste of a lot more cocoa. Add some sugar too. Remember, ready made hot chocolate mixes usually have four times as much sugar as cocoa so don’t worry if you seem to need a lot of sugar. At the same time, don’t put in as much as they do. Use your own judgement to taste for how you want this to be.

If you don’t like all that sugar for any reason then you can try and use an artificial sweetener. Use aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame, etc (but not saccharin as it can have a bitter aftertaste). This makes the hot chocolate drink lack the mouth feel of sugar but it can be a surprisingly good substitute for sugar. Note that an artificial sweetener tablet is very much harder to dissolve in hot milk that hot water, so make sure any tablet you use is dissolved before adding any more. Artificial sweetener powder will need an extra good stir.

(5) I now like to use one of those hand held coffee whisks to really mix up the chocolate drink and give it s a nice head. However if the drink has now cooled and it needs warming up again in the microwave then don’t create a lot of milk foam just yet because the extra heat from the microwave will make the air bubbles in the foam expand and this can overflow the brim of the cup.

(6) Remove the cup from the microwave and make any adjustments to the cocoa liquid/milk ratio to suit your taste. Remember that the sweetness of the sugar becomes more intense as temperature rises. This is in contrast to the cocoa where its bitterness becomes more intense as temperature goes down.

(7) To make a LUXURY version of this hot chocolate you can add some milk powder to make it extra creamy but I prefer to add one or two spoons of powdered coffee creamer. If you don’t have that available then don’t worry. If you prefer to add “single” (thin) cream then you can use that instead but any cream would need to be added to the cold milk because adding a teaspoon or two of (presumably cold) cream at this point will bring the temperature down quite noticeably. One very worthwhile addition to this drink is three or four drops of vanilla essence. I really do recommend this addition. Real vanilla extract is expensive and is often too dilute so use that surprisingly cheap stuff, which is based on synthetic vanillin, from the supermarket for when baking cakes as this is really the best type to use here.

(8) If this is to be a SUPER-LUXURY hot chocolate (even better than just a LUXURY hot chocolate) then finish it off by sprinkling a pinch of cocoa powder on the top. You really need to have a foam there as cocoa powder on the top of liquid milk does not remain in position and will be a miniature demonstration of reduced surface tension which you really don’t want to have at this stage. If you don’t mind dirtying an extra implement then I find that the best way is to put a small pinch of cocoa powder in a tea strainer and then to shake that onto the foam. I use cocoa powder because the tin is right in from of me but if you have it available try powdered cinnamon as this is good too.

(9) Voila! You get a seriously good hot chocolate. As you drink it, if you crave an even more chocolatey taste then just add a spoon of the concentrated cocoa and water mix which you made earlier. Now you see why I said make that cocoa & water mix “oversized”. Mmmmm. Enjoy!

Jane