Review - Tea Room Holiday Chai Nog

The holiday season is here again. It seems to arrive faster every year! And thankfully, the holiday season always brings out the best in hot chocolates from chocolate makers all over the world.

I've know about The Tea Room chocolates for a while now. They make an amazing variety of high quality bars, most of which are infused with tea flavors. Things like milk chocolate with honeybush caramel tea and dark chocolate with raspberry rooibos tea.

A couple months ago I learned they made some drinking chocolates. And not only do they offer 13 great flavor combinations, but they also offer 3 additional holiday flavors.

I picked up a canister of their Holiday Chai Nog. It's a white hot chocolate infused with the flavors of black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, and clove.

Great packaging! Colorful and intricate, very fancy looking.


I love how, right there on the main description page for their drinking chocolate selection, they tell you straight up - "This is not cocoa, it's PREMIUM ORGANIC CHOCOLATE". That's become my mantra since starting this blog. There's a huge difference between hot cocoa and hot chocolate. If you're still drinking cocoa from a packet, please proceed directly to my first posted recipe and have your life changed.

The shaved chocolate looks great, and the smell is just unbelievably comforting! It's the aromatic equivalent of being wrapped in a blanket in front of a fireplace on Christmas Eve! They use all organic ingredients, and I don't mean just the chocolate and tea. Even the spices are organic. And bonus - everything they do is non-GMO and gluten-free.

Included in the tin are instructions for a couple different ways to make the drink. Curiously, they lump both water and milk based recipes together as "European Style". Then they seem to correct themselves and follow up with "Water is classic European". I've been in the mood for creamier hot chocolates lately, so I chose to use half and half, as directed in their "Rich Hot Chocolate" instructions.

The amount of chocolate mix to add is also open to your personal taste, as they recommend 1-3 tablespoons. I like mine as flavorful as I can get it, but I also wanted to review it fairly using their provided instructions. I went ahead and used 3 tablespoons.

Definitely a top notch white hot chocolate, and very much in the spirit of the holidays. I found it to taste like a very light pumpkin spice white hot chocolate, with hints of cinnamon and nutmeg. Very delicious and very much recommended!

Although it says "nog" in the name of the hot chocolate, I didn't get much of an eggnog flavor. (This led me to research what exactly "nog" means, and apparently it's not well defined.)

I've not seen The Tea Room hot chocolates in any stores, but ordering from their site was extremely easy and fast. I will also definitely be checking out more of their flavors, and I'll report back here when I do.

Have a great holiday season!

Recipe - "White Hot" Hot Chocolate

When it comes to eating chocolate, I'm not a huge fan of white chocolate. It's ok when there are other ingredients mixed in, but by itself, I don't know, it's just too sweet or something. But this recipe is really great! It's light and spicy and creamy, everything you'd want from a great hot chocolate.

Is white chocolate even real chocolate? Technically, no, I don't think it is. Ok, what is it, then? Good quality white chocolate is mainly cocoa butter, sugar, and milk. Cocoa butter is the fat content of a cacao bean. When cacao liquor is pressed with tremendous pressure, the cocoa butter is separated out, leaving the solids behind. Those solids are ground further to become cocoa powder. The cocoa butter is often added to processed chocolate to increase its smoothness and creaminess. Cheap white chocolate sometimes has no cocoa butter at all, and can be mostly vegetable fats and sugar.

I'm using Godiva White Chocolate with Vanilla Bean. It's a great, high quality white chocolate, and the vanilla bean right in the bar adds a little extra flavor. 

You can see in the picture above where the heat in the "white hot" name comes from - chili powder! There's also a bit of cinnamon to balance it out a bit. It takes a bit of heat off the chili and a bit of sweetness away from the chocolate, so everything plays nice together.

The ingredient list:

1 3/4 cup milk (2% or whole)

5 tbsp chopped white chocolate

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp chili powder

Put the milk on medium heat on the stove. Once it's just about to boil, add in the white chocolate and spices and whisk until fully melted. Turn the heat down a little and let it steep for a few minutes. Even though we added in what seems to be a lot of white chocolate, you'll find the hot chocolate still has milk flavor, the white chocolate not being overpowering at all.

This drink has some bite to it, too! It's not too bad, just enough to be pleasant. When I first made this and added in that much chili powder, I really thought it would be hotter than it is. I really like this one, much more than I thought I would, considering that I don't really enjoy white chocolate. And it's a nice break from regular hot chocolates.

This is a good one to experiment with on your own, as well. Add less or more chili powder, or try cayenne pepper powder or some other kind of ground pepper. Maybe try adding some vanilla extract to really bring out those flavors in the white chocolate. Garnish it with sprinkles of chili powder or cinnamon, or even cocoa powder. Now that I think about it, maybe this drink would be perfect with some chocolate marshmallows!

Review - Chuao Spicy Maya Hot Chocolate

After trying out that recipe for ancient xocolatl, I thought I'd review one that showed just how far spicy hot chocolates have come in over two thousand years.

The Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego is where I found this one. Chuao's Spicy Maya hot chocolate. While there on a weekend getaway, my girlfriend and I found a great chocolate shop on the bottom floor of the hotel, and this tin was just sitting there innocently. I purchased way more than I should have at that store, and I just couldn't leave this there without trying it. Peppers in hot chocolate was new to me at the time.

Wow! This stuff is just amazing! Hot chocolate with some kick! This is what a sweet, rich, spicy hot chocolate should taste like!

I would later learn that Chuao Chocolatier (pronounced chew-WOW) is right there in San Diego, founded by two brothers from Venezuela, Master Chef Michael Antonorsi and Richard Antonorsi. In 2011, Chuao won the sofi Awards Gold Award for Outstanding Hot Beverage with this firey chocolate drink.

There's a couple peppers in this, pasilla chile and cayenne, but what gives this hot chocolate its kick is the cayenne. The xocolatl recipe I made previously used a green chile, which didn't have quite the heat that the cayenne pepper brings to this party. There's a very distinct difference!

It's definitely got some heat, and you're going to feel it. If you're not a fan of spicy things, this may not be for you. I love spicy stuff, and this hot chocolate is just right. Not a relaxing cup of chocolate, this one's going to wake you up!

I only made the recommended serving, a 1/2 cup, and my throat was definitely burning a little bit after finishing it. In a good way, of course! It's rich and chocolaty (they use a blend of Venezuelan chocolates), and while the peppers give it some bite, the flavor of the peppers do not overpower the chocolate. I added in the last of my homemade marshmallows. (I'll post the recipe soon, since I have to make some more.)

Chuao has some chocolate cafes around San Diego county, so if you're down in that area, check them out. Around Los Angeles, I've spotted this hot chocolate in some Whole Foods stores, so keep your eyes open and check that cocoa section! Chuao's chocolate bars are pretty insane, as well. They have a potato chip bar, a honeycomb bar, maple bacon, and even a bar with pop rocks in it!

There's a bunch more spicy hot chocolates out there I'm going to review in the future. If you like this one, stay tuned. There's a wide variety!

Recipe - Xocolatl, the Original Hot Chocolate

When chocolate was first created from cacao beans over two thousand years ago, it was in the form of a bitter beverage served hot or cold. The first form of solid chocolate wasn't created until the late 18th century. So for the majority of chocolate's existence in human culture, we've been drinking it.

The word "chocolate", according to Wikipedia, comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The word they used was "xocolatl", made up of the words "xococ" meaning bitter and "atl" meaning water or drink.

When I first began researching hot chocolate recipes, I came across some modern ones that attempted to recreate the flavor of those original hot chocolates created by the Aztecs and Mayans. As soon as I saw them, I knew I'd be making one! They sounded pretty bizarre for a hot chocolate.

Let's get started making a modern version of the original hot chocolate!

You're going to need:

2 3/4 cups water
1 green chile pepper, sliced
1/8 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

Looking at that ingredient list, you can see we're working with the same basic stuff that would have been available two thousand years ago. Cocoa, vanilla, and pepper.

Put 3/4 cup of water and the sliced green chile (including the seeds) in a pot and bring it to boiling. Let it boil for 5-10 mins, so the water really takes on the chile flavor.

Strain it to remove the chile and the seeds, then put the water back in the pot. Add in the other 2 cups of water, put it on medium heat, and bring it to a boil again. As it's heating up, whisk in the vanilla extract. The vanilla mixed into the pepper water smells really good! I was surprised, I didn't think it would be very appetizing.

Finally, once it's boiling, add in the cocoa powder and keep whisking for another 5 minutes or so. You'll notice the mixture froths easily, but it's not a very thick froth.

This one is probably the healthiest hot chocolates you'll ever come across. No sugar at all, and the only thing even close to a sweetener is the vanilla. Unsweetened cocoa is actually very good for you. It has more antioxidants that green tea, blueberries, or wine, and can help lower cholesterol.

However, this hot chocolate isn't what us modern folk would consider delicious. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, but it wasn't great, either. The chile adds an interesting flavor that works well with the cocoa, but this drink reminded me more of thin, bitter coffee than it did a thick, yummy hot chocolate.

Hahahaha, in fact, after a few tastes, I didn't even want to drink all of it. I added in a few spoonfuls of sugar and it became much more enjoyable! If you want to sweeten it without ruining the healthier aspect of it, try blackstrap molasses or date sugar. Those are both amazingly healthy sweeteners!

If you like this hot chocolate a lot, try it with the actual versions of the ingredients the Aztecs and Mayans would have used. Get some cocoa nibs and grind them up into cocoa liquor, and use a vanilla bean or two instead of the liquid vanilla extract.

What a fun experiment! And now that we have an idea of where hot chocolate came from, we can really appreciate what the Europeans did for it by adding in sweeteners in the 17th century.

And don't worry, the next recipe I post will be a sweet, delicious cup of creamy awesomeness!