I have been really intent on making real hot chocolate for a while now. I cannot stand the powdered stuff that gets passed off as a suitable replacement, so I took to the Internet and was lucky to get a hit on the first site I tried. (I would have been amazed if Cook’s Illustrated didn’t have a recipe for it!) True hot chocolate ends up being about as easy to make as it’s powdered counterpart, it just takes a little bit longer and you have to have the ingredients on hand. The key is balancing the amount of dairy with the amount of chocolate, and you have to use good chocolate to get a good result. Sugar and vanilla are added to enhance the taste, but the amounts are negligible considering how much dairy and chocolate you have. I just have to say that the real stuff is absolutely amazing, and you will never want the powdered stuff again.

What made the hot chocolate even better, though, was drinking it with hot cinnamon buns. Now, in the case of cinnamon buns I will sometimes just use the canned variation from the freezer, but I find that it produces inconsistent results, usually with a lot of burning on the bottom. Instead, I flipped to a recipe I’ve relied on for a while in King Arthur Flour’s Baker’s Companion. Unlike other cinnamon bun recipes which rely on a quick bread method (e.g., leavening with baking powder, baking soda, or both), this recipe relies on yeast, giving it a distinct flavor in the dough itself and an airier texture. Unfortunately, the filling designed by KAF leaves something to be desired, as it does not give the impact that one normally expects from a cinnamon bun. I intend to experiment adding ground clove and ground nutmeg into the mixture in the future to give the taste the radiating warmth that one should feel when biting into a cinnamon bun.