Hot Cocoa (Basic Recipe)

I learned something quite crucial to my quest today. Hot chocolate is not the same thing as hot cocoa. Hot chocolate is made from chunks of, you guessed it, chocolate, melted down into the mix. Hot cocoa is from powdered chocolate.


What I am making tonight is the aptly titled Hot Cocoa (Basic Recipe) from an ancient copy of The Good Housekeeping Cook Book (A.N. to Blogspot: Where is your underline option? I had to go and underline it manually with the HTML edit. COME ON GUYS GET ON THE BALL.) When I say ancient, I do mean, ancient. It is copyright 1944.

Anyway, here is the recipe they provided:


However I will be only making one serving, since I am home alone for tonight and I don't think even I could stomach 6 servings of a chocolate drink. So it has been cut down to one serving:

1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp sugar (to taste)
1/4 c. water
~2/3 c. milk
drop of vanilla extract or more

We didn't have any vanilla extract, so I had to get some pure vanilla from this sucker:


Yes, this is a massive wine-sized bottle of vanilla from Mexico.

Some cooking later and here is the cup!


As you can see, it didn't quite fill all the way. The recipe said to beat it to make it frothy, but I'm pretty lazy and this was looking really appetizing, so I skipped it.

The first taste was... weird. I don't really know how to describe it, but it did make me wonder if our milk was just slightly bad. It's not, and after the first sip it started to taste much better. There is still that underlying aftertaste of unsweetened cocoa (which I loathe), but I think if I had used a little more sugar it would have been better. Overall, it was a very nice basic recipe that I could use in the future while trying out different flavors.