How to make a decent cup of hot chocolate

It's been a weird day - turns out (I think, I still need confirmation from my boss) that I had myshift times confused and have been arrriving at work half an hour late for the last two weeks! I found that out while chatting to one of the other employees while arranging shifts this morning. Of course nobody had said anything, which means that either I was right and therefore not late (pleasepleaseplease!) or else that they were being the lovely people that they are and thikning I've been sleeping in and as I'm working during the week to help out they're being polite about it.

 

So anyway we have a lab party tomorrow (yay!) and so I've been baking choc-chip and cranberry cookies which are awesome! It's a recipe I got from my super-awesome sister-in-law and I made them on the weekend. They went down relatively well with all the random people I gave them to so I'm hoping the second attempt will go well! Unfortunately last time I made two dozen and this time I made them a bit bigger to try and conserve the chewy-centreness and only ended up with 15, which is a problem because I wanted to take some to work tomorrow afternoon to shield myself with when I ask about whether or not I've been very consistently late in the mornings.

 

While I'm waiting for them to bake, I thought I would teach the world something that a few friends and I discovered in first year. Of course very few ideas are original and so I apologise if someone else thought of it first, but I know of it purely by experimenting between Chemistry and Stats, while we were trying to get out physics lab prep done.

 

So to make a really awesome cup of hot chocolate:

1. Forget about being healthy. Close your eyes and force all thoughts of Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Tai Chi or Yoga.Take a deep breath through your nose... hold it... and out through your mouth... Open your eyes. You are ready to begin.
2. Take a mug and put the requisite amount of hot chocolate powder in it. Add a tiny splash of milk (type of milk isn't important, I have tried it with soy milk as well as good old cow mammary fluids and they both work equally well).
3. Stir the milk/powder mix really vigourously with your teaspoon. The mixture should almost make a paste and you want to get as many air-bubbles in as possible, so stir like a maniac until the water has boiled.
4. Add boiling water and stir. The whole milk-paste-stirring thing should have made it all nice and foamy.
5. Now, for the best part: find some plain milk chocolate. You need about two squares (like you get in those cute little party-pack chocolates). If you have a big block then break off a strip which should be two or three squares. Whatever makes you happy (short of getting a blender and adding a kilogram of the stuff. That wouldn't fit in a mug, and I expect you'd feel pretty darn sick afterwards).
6. Drop the chocolate into the hot chocolate.
7. Now you have two options. Some people like to give it a minute or two to melt and then they stir it in. I prefer to drink the hot chocolate and then eat the melted chocolate off the bottom with my teapsoon when I'm done, while giggling like a sugar-high kid who found the stash of christmas presents. The chocolate does melt and dissolve into the hot chocolate which makes it get stronger as you drink it.

And voila! Awesome hot chocolate with very little effort!

 

I'm off to harvest biscuits, good luck with the hot chocolate, and remember that it might be hot, so be careful to avoid chocolate burns!