To want a good hot chocolate?!

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Help! Need your recommendations for a really good hot chocolate i can make at home. Feeling especially cold & miserable and am always really underwhelmed with usual supermarket offerings (options & highlights etc) I'm going to walk to my village and grab necessities when the baby wakes and would love your suggestions of how you make / what you use for a top hot choc! Xx

Lovely recipes here.

Clipper is the best instant I’ve found. As pp mentions, velvety texture and not too sweet.

I love hot chocolate but refuse to have the stuff in cafes in the UK because it's so insipid. Don't like the thick Spanish style stuff either, it's thickened with cornflour which takes away from the rich chocolateness you get in e.g. France.

Hot chocolate powder is just cocoa plus sugar so like others I like to use pure cocoa (tons of it) and FF milk then sweeten to taste. A square or two of dark chocolate melted in it adds more fat and makes it smooth, and giving it a good whisk helps as well. It should taste so chocolatey an expresso cup size serving is sufficient. Heaven!

Yes to Clipper. I don't like a lot of milk so prefer hot chocolates made with hot water and this is the only one I know which is actually delicious.

3 teaspoons (or more if you like it dark) of good cocoa powder, Van Houten if you can find it, 1 or 2 tsp of sugar, a little splash of coffee cream, enough to mix it till a just turned smooth paste, then add the hot milk while stirring.

DH bought loads of different brands from the grocery last week and we did a blind taste test at home.

Obviously personal tastes differ. For us, Cafe Direct San Cristobal won hands down. The runner up was Cafe Direct Sao Tome.

It's surprising how different they all tasted when tried at the same time. Here's the rest of what we had:

• Waitrose Luxuriously rich, intense & velvety drinking chocolate (surprisingly good)
• Green & Black's Organic hot chocolate drink (next one after Waitrose)
• Whittard's 70% cocoa hot chocolate (too bitter and not smooth enough)
• Twinings Swiss chocolate drink (too sweet)
• Clipper Seriously Velvety instant hot chocolate (pretty bad, have given it away)
• Charbonnel et Walker Chocolat Charbonnel

(the worst of the lot, tasted synthetic, have given it away)

A Christmas present? It's like a coffee machine but for hot chocolate www.hotelchocolat.com/uk/velvetiser-hot-chocolate-machine.html

I've got a gadget like the NewYolker by Krups, had it 2-3 years now and it's still going strong. love making hot choc in it and I always used to use it with my nespresso machine too until I got the Creatista.