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A Chocolatier Guide to Luxury Hot Chocolate In this article we will share our best Luxury Hot Chocolate Recipes! Melt Chocolates is an artisan chocolate boutique based in Notting Hill London, and our ethos is to teach people to enjoy chocolate in its purest form. This includes hot chocolate! As we move swiftly into the cold months of November and December, we enter a new, cosier phase of living. One which centers around warmth, comfort and happiness. As the leaves turn golden and the days grow darker, we take harbour from the crisp winter air in small cafes filled with the smell of hot chocolate and cakes. You can’t beat that feeling of contentment, when you hold that warm mug of hot chocolate, the steam curling onto your face, as you sit wrapped up in a blanket watching the cold wind blow outside. This feeling is defined by Scandanavian people as ‘Hygge‘. Though it has no direct translation, we can better understand Hygge as a concept with key features or practices. Some of the ways to experience hygge is to light soft atmospheric candles, sit under a warm blanket with a book, and to enjoy a hot drink and a sweet treat! The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking found that the number 1 thing that Danes associate hygge with was hot drinks. So we want to share our best luxury hot chocolate recipes so that you can recreate that perfect hot chocolate café moment at home with your friends and family. The Key to Any Luxury Hot Chocolate: Chocolate The key to a delicious hot chocolate is the chocolate! In our luxury hot chocolate recipes we use pure chocolate – not cocoa powder or hot chocolate mixtures. Make sure you choose high quality solid chocolate. We would recommend choosing any chocolate over 35%. Anything below and it risks your hot chocolate just becoming too sugary. Also good quality chocolate melts at body temperature. If you held one button of dark chocolate and one white chocolate button in the palm of your hand, the dark would melt first. So when you’re making hot chocolate, you want your chocolate to melt beautifully into the milk. So the higher the percentage on the chocolate (the darker it is) the better it is for hot chocolate! No Added Sugar We also believe in letting the chocolate flavours speak for itself, so in all of these recipes there is no added sugar. There is enough sugar in milk chocolate already to make the hot chocolate sweet! We like our hot chocolates to soothe rather than to excite, just like the hygge mentality. The feeling after drinking a hot chocolate should be peaceful, not a sugar rush! Though of course, each person is welcome to personalise these recipes as they wish! Adding some sweet whipped cream or marshmallows to make your hot chocolate perfect for you is encouraged. So, here are some simple recipes to inspire you to make the best hot chocolate you can: 1. The Fluffy Bunny Hot Chocolate: The Fluffy Bunny is the perfect hot chocolate for children, or for those of us who prefer the milkier, fluffier kinds of hot chocolate. This hot chocolate recipe […]

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The Real Inventor Wasn’t Hans Sloane Either If you ask almost anyone who invented milk chocolate, you’ll probably hear one of two names. Daniel Peter. The Swiss chocolatier who commercialised milk chocolate in 1875. Or Hans Sloane. The Irish physician who supposedly “invented” milk chocolate after visiting Jamaica in the late seventeenth century. Both stories are neat and both are wrong. The history of chocolate has a habit of celebrating the people who patented, sold or industrialised an idea, while forgetting the people who actually created it and milk chocolate is perhaps the greatest example of this. Because almost two hundred years before Daniel Peter produced his famous bars in Switzerland, and years before Hans Sloane ever stepped foot in Jamaica, enslaved communities on the island were already preparing chocolate with milk as part of their everyday lives. History just haven’t given them the credit. The Hans Sloane Myth The traditional story goes something like this. Hans Sloane travelled to Jamaica in 1687 as physician to the Governor. While there, he supposedly disliked the bitter taste of chocolate and decided to mix it with milk. On returning to England, the story continues, this recipe eventually became the foundation of Cadbury, Nestlé and the modern milk chocolate industry. It sounds like an attractive story. A brilliant European doctor, a simple discovery and an invention that changed chocolate forever. But the problem is that the historical evidence tells a different story. Sloane actually never claimed to have invented milk chocolate. He just documented what he observed. And what he observed was that enslaved communities were already drinking chocolate made with milk – for survival, not for enjoyment. The Evidence Appears Before Sloane So what’s more interesting is that we don’t even need to rely on Hans Sloane. A physician named William Hughes was writing in Jamaica roughly a decade before Sloane arrived. He wrote in his journal published, The American Physitian (1672), that enslaved people were using local methods of preparing chocolate. Enslaved people from Africa survived on a largely African diet during their horrific passages from the African continent. Food like millets, yams, plantains and cowpeas. Leftover grains would become a potential source of seed stock. This would allow enslaved people to cultivate these crops in the Americas. Slave owners did not feed their workforce. Enslaved people were not only forcibly put to work, but they also were responsible for their own survival. John H. Parry, the historian recognised this, and noted of the arrival of new groups in the Caribbean, “All these people had to be fed.” The plantation owners would sometimes supply salted fish and grains to sustain their workforce. But it was not enough to live off. Scarcity of food was one of the common experiences enslaved labourers suffered through on the island.1 Once on the plantations or “colonies”, they had to rely on foraging, planting and risking punishment to support themselves. Some of the foods and goods that enslaved people enjoyed and cultivated for themselves were the basis for their popularity in the global market. For example, Tobacco was not always sold for profit, Africans and Amerindians grew it for their own consumption. This was a time of integration – European crops […]

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