kill vehicle

I make a lot of cocoa. I don’t make much hot chocolate — cocoa is cheap and easy to drink a lot of, and hot chocolate is thick and a bit too rich. Usually.

I’ve been making il Bicerin recently, though, and it’s essentially hot chocolate topped with an espresso con panna. It’s delicious, and it got me thinking about hot chocolate a bit more. The process of making it is fun — I like whisking the chocolate together with the milk and watching the texture and consistency change. Plus, it smells great.

With that in mind, I figured I’d try to merge the cocoa I usually make with the chocolate base for the bicerin and experiment a bit. I’m pretty happy with the results:

Hot Chocolate

• 5 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped into small bits
• 1 pint milk
• 2/3 cup heavy cream
• 3 oz Kahlua
• freshly grated cinnamon
• freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• a pinch of salt
• black pepper

Combine the chocolate with the spices and vanilla in a small saucepan. You want something with fairly high sides, since the mixture will foam up under heat.

(I haven’t listed any amounts for the spices for two reasons. First, it’s all to taste, and second, I didn’t measure them. I used about 15 grates of cassia stick on a microplane grater for the cinnamon, about five grates of whole nutmeg, and about five grinds of black pepper, but your mileage may vary. The chocolate flavor is very strong, though, so you’ll need to put in a lot of spices to overpower it and make the drink unpleasant.)

Add 1 1/2 cups of milk to the pan and place over medium-high heat, whisking frequently until it starts to boil. Keep a close eye on the mixture — it can boil over very very quickly and leave you with a burned mess on your stove.

While the chocolate is heating, whip 1/3 cup of the cream to serve as the topping. You can add sugar, but I like the contrast of the unsweetened cream with the super-sweet chocolate. The cream should be spreadable but not rock-hard; lumps of cream are less attractive than a nice smooth layer.

When the chocolate starts bubbling, whisk constantly for about two minutes. The mixture can boil over very easily, so you may want to lower the heat a bit once it reaches a full boil. After two minutes, remove the mixture from heat and let it stop boiling.

Add the Kahlua, the remaining milk, and the remaining cream. Whisk until smooth, returning the mixture to the heat briefly if you’d like it warmer.

Serve in a nice comforting mug, topped with an even layer of whipped cream.

When I started moving my programming workflow over from the stone tools Emacs+GCC approach I’d been used to for so long to something more Mac-like, I got pretty comfortable with TextWrangler and BBEdit, but I kept occasionally going back to Emacs specifically for dabbrev-complete mode.

It’s one of those tools that you just can’t do without once you get used to it — autocompleting arbitrary text and magically getting the completion suggestions right is pretty handy and great even if your codebase doesn’t have the addiction to super-long identifier names that my current employer does.

I sure wish I’d known about BBAutoComplete a long time ago. It’s almost exactly dabbrev for scriptable Mac applications like TW and BBEdit, and it’s free.

This morning, a friend mentioned il bicerin, a Piedmontese coffee and chocolate drink. It’s been mentioned in the NBC Olympic coverage, and the commentators seem to think it’s delicious.

There’s an article by David Lebovitz about it with a picture that definitely looked delicious, so I figured I’d try it. I chopped up a few ounces of dark chocolate, melted it in a cup of milk, boiled it down while whisking, brewed a few shots of espresso, whipped some cream, and mixed it all together in a few rocks glasses (I, er, don’t actually have good glass cappuccino cups, which I really ought to fix).

Turns out it’s just as delicious as it looks, and about as close to mainlining chocolate, sugar, and caffeine as you’re ever likely to get.

Do yourself a favor and try it immediately.

New addiction: Animal Crossing DS.

My friend code is 1375-0438-5340.

I am a lousy fisherman, but I’m currently choosing to blame Ray for catching all of the fish in my tiny village of Homewood.