Making Presidential Hot Chocolate

Series Summary

As a chilly breeze streaks across your face, you look across the icy streets to see sugarplum fairies dancing through the leafless trees. It is now as clear as the icicle hanging from the veranda that it is wintertime. It is the time of snowball fights in the park, chains around car tires, fires in the fireplace, and...hot chocolate. There is nothing better than hot chocolate to cure the chill of wintertime. ExpertVillage knows the necessity of hot chocolate and has thus made an easy step by step video tutorial for different hot chocolate recipes.

In this free video series, watch as dessert food and drink expert Scott Gottfried teaches how to make hot chocolate. Learn how to make all different flavors of hot chocolate: presidential, royal, coconut, devil's, drunken, white chocolate, orange mint, orange, peppermint, nestle, marshmallow, peanut butter cup, oreo, peanut butter, banana mint, and cherry. Get ready to curl up with that special someone and enjoy a frothy mug of hot chocolate during the holiday season.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Scott for Expert Village and today I’m going to teach you how to make Presidential Hot Chocolate. First thing of course that you need for hot chocolate is a pan to warm up your milk in. Having warm milk for hot chocolate is very important. The next thing you need of course is actually one cup of milk, 2.5 ounces of chocolate, a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of vanilla, and a little bit of salt. When we’re finished of course, we’ll top it off with whipped cream. But first, let’s get started on this recipe. The first important part that we have to do is get started here, is to turn the heat on, on the pan. I’ll put it at a medium, because we have to bring the milk to a simmer. So we’ll take our cup of milk now, and we’ll just add it to here. Now that we have the milk in here, make sure that you bring it up to a slow simmer, not boiling it, because if you boil it, it’ll start turning into a disgusting little film that you don’t want to drink. So we have to keep an eye on this, make sure that we don’t see any film on the top and keep the heat a little bit by medium, but not completely medium. Okay, it seems our milk is warm enough to start adding our chocolate. You take your pieces of chocolate and place them in there carefully but don’t break them up. With the low heat setting, we’ll make sure they don’t burn but what’s also important is that you take a wooden spoon and you stir it slowly to make sure that the melting process happens evenly. Now that the chocolate is pretty much melted, the next part we take is our vanilla syrup and we’re going to add this to it. This gives it a little interesting flavor. I guess that the president really likes that. Well the next part that we have to add while this is simmering is a little bit of salt. Salt, you say? Well that also adds a little bit of a different kick to it. But you can’t add too much or else that will have a negative effect on the milk that we have in here. So it’s not really judged out but when you take your salt, just take a little pinch, once you have it in there, we’re pretty much finished. So now we just keep mixing this up until the chocolate is completely done. Okay, it looks like everything is completely melted and mixed together really well. It’ll have a certain kind of consistency to it, it’ll have a little flaky, almost a little bit thick, almost a kind of pudding before it settles. That’s how you know you did it right. You pick up your hot chocolate that you just made, you’ve got to be sure that you’re careful when you’re pouring it because sometimes we spill over a little bit. And when you’re pouring it out, you’ll see that the consistency is just right, cause it’s still liquidly, but it has a little bit of bubbles to it and a little bit of thickness to it which is perfect. Grab your cinnamon, take a little pinch of it, and sprinkle it on top. Now you can’t always expect to get it right the first time, that’s why you have to try it a few times, but once you get it right you’ll figure out how to do it exactly to your specifications. For Expert Village, yum, I’m Scott."