So Easter is coming next week here, so I decided to do for my friends and family one of my favourite desserts: home made chocolate! It’s about 5 years since I last made it, so it’s a nice experiment to run.

I’m in no way a professional cook, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m just sharing this because it’s fun. I’m not responsible if you’re stupid enough to set your kitchen on fire.

The recipe is fairly straight forward. Weights in the comments are using metric system and shit, because I can’t convert grams into cheeseburgers per freedom.

  • Prep time: 15 minutes
  • Cooking time: 10 minutes
  • Portions: 24
  • Calories: 200/portion

Ingredients

  • 450 grams of sugar
  • 150 ml water
  • 10 grams of vanilla sugar (make sure you don’t get the one with vanilla grains, because it will make the syrup stick and burn)
  • 150 grams of 80% fat butter
  • 500 grams powdered milk
  • 50 grams of cocoa (depending on preference, you can up this to 75-100 grams)

How I prepared it

1. Boiled the water, the sugar and the vanilla sugar into a saucepan.

The most important detail of this recipe was the thickness of the syrup, a thicker one will yield a denser chocolate. One of the best ways for me to see if it’s thick enough, is to let some drops fall into a glass of water and see if the drops stay together. Another good visual guide is that the bubbles are bigger and move slower than at the start. I didn’t have a candy thermometer, but if I had one, I could have boiled it to about 118ºC.

2. When the syrup got to the desired consistency, I moved it off the fire, and added the butter, cut into small cubes.

This brings the syrup’s temperature down, so I put it on and off the fire, so it didn’t solidify.

3. Mixed the powdered milk and cocoa in a spacious enough bowl. An important thing to check is to make sure you don’t have lumps in the mix.

4. Once the syrup gets a bit cold (50-55ºC) I poured it slowly over the powdered milk and cocoa mix. My sister helped me and mixed it thoroughly with a spoon, but you can even knead with your hand if needed. We needed to be fast, because if the syrup cools down completely, it will get almost solid!

5. When the chocolate is properly mixed and still a bit warm, I put it on a tray, over parchment paper, gave it a nice level and let it cool down.

I could have added stuff into it or over it, but I like it simple and because my syrup was a bit thinner than I desired, I also let it rest a bit in the fridge. Cut it in pieces of whatever size with a pizza cutter and enjoyed it while it lasted.