White Hot Chocolate

 

 

I don’t know if any of you in the Midwest and New England have noticed, but IT’S FREAKING COLD OUTSIDE. Winter got kind of a late start in 2013 (you know, since we didn’t our usual freak blizzard on Halloween) and it appears that it is now trying to make up for that lost time with a foot of new snow every week and frequent subzero temperatures. I don’t recall moving to the South Pole, but then again my GPS has never been all that reliable.

 

There are very few times that I get cold. Like, really cold. Cold enough that I pile on the layers and burrito myself (yes, I made that a verb) in six blankets and still can’t shake the chill. This has happened several times in the past couples months – you know, Polar Vortex and all. This weekend I was running errands and ran into this problem. And since it’s not really acceptable to go grocery shopping wearing a sleeping bag, I decided a White Hot Chocolate would do the trip. Closest place? Dunkin Donuts.

 

I’m not a Dunkin Donuts fan. Between being a Bears/Blackhawks/Cubs fan, not knowing how to use the word “wicked” in a sentence, and not liking Dunkin Donuts it’s pretty well established that Massachusetts is never going to accept me as one of their own. I don’t know what it is… to me, it’s just the McDonald’s of coffee and I don’t know why people are so fanatical about it. If you work at/like McDonald’s, please don’t be offended – it’s just not my jam. I would take Starbucks or Caribou Coffee over Dunkin any day. But since they don’t have Caribou Coffee out here, and the nearest Starbucks was at the other side of town, I settled. I checked out the menu, saw that they still have pretty much the only thing I’ll drink on there, and placed my order. Let me preface what comes next by saying there was a giant poster next to the menu about the sixteen million different kinds of hot chocolate they offer.

Needless to say, I was disappointed. And still cold. And dead set on a White Hot Chocolate.

 

So I headed home and decided to make my own White Hot Chocolate. I didn’t have any white chocolate at the house, so I made a quick pit stop and grabbed a couple Ghirardelli Classic White Chocolate Baking Bars. You can use any kind you’d like, but I’ll tell you right now that you want to make sure one of the ingredients is cocoa butter because it makes a word of difference. Just trust me on this. After about 5 minutes, I had myself a delicious White Hot Chocolate that I completed with a pile of whipped cream and chocolate shavings. Voila! I could hardly tell the difference between DD and mine. Homemade is always better anyway, so go make this. Right now. It’s cold, you’re cold, and this is hot. And did I mention delicious?