Review - Moonstruck Dark Hot Cocoa

My sister-in-law and her family live in Portland, and this past Christmas my wife and I took the opportunity to fly up there for the first time. Portland is great! Not overly crowded like Los Angeles, and they have a huge variety of trendy places to eat and shop - not to mention some amazing chocolate shops!

We were walking the streets after visiting Cacao (which will be the topic of a future post) and stumbled upon Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe. Wow, what a surprise! I've long enjoyed Moonstruck's chocolate bars, and while I'm sure I had read on the label that they were located in Portland, I wasn't even thinking of it at the time, and I certainly was not aware that they had a whole cafe.

Inside we found a cute little cafe serving all kinds of coffee and chocolate drinks. They had a great selection of pastries and chocolate morsels, as well as all their packaged chocolate products on display for sale.

They also had a decent selection of hot chocolates and drinking chocolates on the menu. If you don't know the difference, drinking chocolates are thicker, richer, and come in smaller servings.

They had a special holiday hot chocolate available, so that's what I got. Rocky Road hot chocolate. It was good, but not mind blowing, like I was hoping it would be. It felt like a powder mix with some extra flavorings added in. Still good, of course. Hot chocolate is like pizza - even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. And this was far from bad.

I hadn't seen their hot chocolates available in stores near me in Los Angeles, so I went ahead and picked up their basic Dark Hot Cocoa mix. I figured it'd be a good place to start with their mixes.

A few things jumped out at me immediately. First off, the ingredients list. Notice there is more sugar than cocoa. Hmmm... Suspicious. As a lover of fine hot chocolates, I always prefer to see cocoa or cocoa mass (liquor) as the main ingredient. I do like that the ingredient list is small, however. Natural flavor is a bit vague, it could be almost anything. Guar gum I'm guessing is being used here as a thickener.

I made mine according to the instructions on the tin. Sometimes I like to deviate, but for a fair review, I make it as instructed. The tin even has a little indulgent, encouraging paragraph there on the back, almost a poem.


The mix itself is extremely light and fluffy. Don't breathe too hard into the tin, it'll go everywhere! The fault there lies with the powdered sugar, since it's basically that exact same texture. I don't mind it, though. Powdered sugar dissolves easier that normal sugar.






It's a very tasty mix, I actually like it better than the Rocky Road hot chocolate I had in the cafe. This mix has the flavor of cherry or amaretto, which was kind of surprising, as it's supposed to be just a plain dark chocolate mix. It was very pleasant, though.

It's a good mix for sure, however, I'm just a little disappointed that a chocolate maker such as Moonstruck doesn't create a mix with real chocolate in it. That's something I'd certainly love to see from them, as their chocolate bars are wonderful and come in many great flavors. Of course, nothing is stopping us from just using those bars as a hot chocolate, right?