Guys! Guys! Guys! I have to tell you about this recipe I just found! It’s amazing. It’s a recipe for instant hot chocolate mix recipe (without powdered milk) that’s WAY better than store-bought!

Hot Chocolate.

The sound of it invokes images of cold, blustery snow days, intimate Winter nights in front of the fire and just down right coziness.

When my step-daughter visits during the summer, I pour myself a cup of coffee, pour her a cup of hot chocolate and we start the day out on the front porch together.

I treasure our early morning conversations together over our cups of “coffee”.

And now that the baby has discovered hot chocolate (or “‘ot doctat”) the tradition continues.

We tend to restrict sugar in our house, but I can’t bring myself to deny them the simple pleasure of hot chocolate during the colder seasons.

Store-Bought Mix Hot Chocolate

Like we did with our homemade chocolate syrup, I took a good hard look at a VERY common instant hot chocolate mix.

Ingredients:

• sugar
• modified whey
• cocoa (processed with alkali)
• hydrogenated coconut oil
• nonfat milk
• calcium carbonate

less than 2% of:

• salt
• dipotassium phosphate
• mono- and dyglyderides
• artificial flavor
• carrageenan

I won’t go into detail about the evils of these ingredients. (If you haven’t read my rant about carageenan, check out my post on Why You Should Homestead and scroll down to the Food Freedom section).

All I’m going to say about the ingredients above is that there are more processed/artificial ingredients than whole foods.

My Homemade instant Hot Chocolate mix Recipe

My recipe is made out of real food – the things our grandmothers cooked with and is easily recognizable as FOOD.

Dipotassium phosphate is categorized by the FDA as “generally recognized as safe.” Gee…that makes me feel great about giving it to my kids…

A lot of the recipes I originally found for homemade hot chocolate mix called for confectioners sugar.

I do not use this personally because I don’t keep confectioners sugar around. The few times I bought confectioners sugar for baking, I bought a bag of it, used a couple Tablespoons and then threw the rest out a few months (or years, to be honest) later because I never used it again and it got hard as a rock.

I don’t like using ingredients that are going to go to waste later.

And this recipe doesn’t need it! I honestly think they use confectioners sugar in addition to regular to give it a creamy texture, but the milk and cocoa do that well enough.

This homemade version is quick and easy to whip together and then stored in a mason jar in my pantry for future use.

The recipe below will fill up a quart mason jar and half of another quart. Add some mini marshmallows and you have a sweet homemade YUMMY gift.

Why No Powdered Milk?

While there is a lot of information online about the risks of oxidized cholesterol in powdered milk, that’s not the reason I avoid it in this recipe.

I doubt you could drink enough hot chocolate to ingest a substantial amount of oxidized cholesterol.

The reason I avoid it is that it clumps up when you mix it with real milk – and real is always better than fake! (Or dried).

So in this recipe, I removed the powdered milk and, instead, recommend you just mix the chocolate with real milk – problem solved!

Whip up a batch and let me know how you like it!

For more decadent chocolate recipes, check out:

• Dark Chocolate Stout Brownies
• Homemade Chocolate Syrup for Canning
• Chocolate Fondue Dippers

Or to make an herbal hot chocolate recipe, check out Herbal Academy’s Hot (Chocolate) Mama.