Mexican Vanilla & Hot Chocolate

With my Nielsen-Massey Vanilla trio in hand, I am off to the hot chocolate races. First up, is the Mexican Vanilla. According to the Nielsen-Massey box, Mexican Vanilla is one of the best Vanillas for chocolate and cinnamon. This is perfect for my recipe! When I think of Mexico I think of fruity flavors…why… I don’t know but orange came to my head.

Nonetheless, the recipe I came up with was ¾ cup whole milk, 2 tsp Mexican Vanilla, 2 tbls Orange Juice, 1 Cinnamon stick, 1 tbls Sugar and 2 tbls of NoMU Cocoa Powder. The most important ingredient, of course, is the cocoa powder. The one selected for this brew is NoMU from Cape Town, South Africa. I found this bad boy on one of my many adventures back home to California. NoMU’s cocoa powder is Dutch Processed which means the cocoa was processed with an alkalizing agent (potassium carbonate) to remove the acidity from the cocoa.

In order to capture the true essence of the Vanilla, I decided to add the Vanilla and Cinnamon stick to the milk and let everything “marinate” in the ‘frig for a few hours.

A little while later, I added the rest of the ingredients to my double boiler, mixed it up and heated through. Since I can’t stand skim, I always heat my hot chocolate creations on a medium-low heat and stir consistently to avoid a skim appearance.

Since my husband’s friend Micah was visiting us, we had a hot chocolate and cocoa infused dessert festival. Micah thought the Mexican Hot Chocolate was “earthy and calming”. Also, he liked the after kick of the Orange Juice. Frank, my husband, enjoyed this one too, but he loves anything with chocolate.

Next up is the Tahitian Vanilla….

Nielsen-Massey Vanillas & Hot Chocolate

Vanilla is one of the most popular ingredients in hot chocolate. One of the perks of working at Williams-Sonoma was access to wonderful spices, ingredients and, of course, the employee discount.

One of my many purchases was a Nielsen-Massey Vanilla Extract sampler with three bottles of Vanilla from different regions of the world. It contains one 2 oz bottle of Mexican Vanilla Extract, Madagascar Vanilla Extract and Tahitian Vanilla Extract. Each bottle was very fragrant and I just know it has a delicious flavor. Now, I am ready to create some powerful hot chocolate recipes with this trio of taste.

Granita w/Anisette Sugar

My next frozen dessert adventure was with Chocolat Vital’s Cocoa Cardamom Tango Black Tea made with cinnamon, chocolate chips (sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa powder, emulsifier lecithin) cardamom, cardamom seeds and natural flavoring. With this fragrant tea, I know I have a winning recipe on hand to make Granita.

Granita or Granite is an iced Italian dessert. Since an ice cream maker isn’t necessary, the texture of the dessert is very coarse (look at my picture). To make this simple recipe, I brewed 2 cups of H20 with 1 tablespoon of tea and added ¾ cup of Anisette Sugar.

Unfortunately, Granite is not supposed to be very sweet, so I blew this recipe in theory. However, I think ½ cup sugar would be better since Anisette Sugar is very flavorful. To me, Anisette Sugar tastes like black licorice. Outside of this recipe or making an actual cup of hot chocolate, I wouldn’t touch this sugar but it added such a nice taste….

SerendipiTea ChocolaTea Sorbet

Now that I’ve recovered from a crashed hard drive and my recent work related travel, I am back on the blog! My frozen dessert rampage continues… This time I was busy creating a sorbet and granite with cocoa infused teas.

Sorbets are basically a frozen mixture of flavored ice usually enhanced with a fruit puree and sugar. A lot lighter than ice cream, sorbets are really great for those that are lactose intolerant since water is usually used vs. milk

After brewing up 3–½ cups of H20 with 3 tablespoons of serendipiTea’s ChocolaTea made with Chocolate, Vanilla, Rooibos and Black Tea, I added 1-½ cups of Demerara Sugar and ½ cup of cocoa nibs from Scharffen Berger. With the Ice Cream/Sorbet maker ready to go, I added the water mixture to the machine and hit the on button. Please make sure you let the tea get room temperature!!! What should have been an evening event turned into two days because I was too impatience to let the tea cool.

Twenty five minutes later, I had a yummy dessert. I must warn those not familiar with cocoa nibs they test nothing like chocolate chips (which is what they look like in the picture). These are definitely not sweet….they have a nutty robust flavor and are very crunchy. A cocoa nib is a roasted cacao bean separated from it’s shell and husk.

Normally, I am not a fan of cocoa nibs. But the contract of sweet and a little bitter was nice.