Someone at home was hooked on making hot chocolate but wasn’t happy with what mixes were available at the shops. Most of the hot chocolate mixes at the supermarket were too sweet or too powdery. I ended up buying Blai a bar of Lindt dark chocolate for him to make it himself but he couldn’t be fussed to actually prep it and ate the entire bar instead. Huh.

When the opportunity arose to try Hans Sloane drinking chocolate, I jumped at it. This would make our nightly hot chocolate ritual actually happen! Yes, the company is named for the eminent physician and botanist who, in addition to the rest of his work and collecting, developed a way of mixing cocoa with milk to make a drink and pioneered drinking chocolate in Europe.

The company were kind enough to send me a pack each of their milk and dark chocolate beads and also a Christmas special, a single serving dark chocolate bauble filled with more dark chocolate beads. That last little Christmas ball was the first thing we tried.

Hans Sloane Hot Chocolates

Christmas Bauble

Into a mug it went…

Christmas Bauble in Mug

…and we poured hot milk over. Stir, stir, stir and we had a mug of hot chocolate. (OK, we made a bit of a mess.)

Hot Chocolate

What I was particularly impressed with was hot smooth the hot chocolate was – when I’ve made hot chocolate from scratch before, I’ve always had to whisk the mixture but here we only used a spoon. The flavour was excellent – the dark chocolate was rich and coated the mouth nicely. If there was a problem, it was just a teeny bit too sweet but it was still much better than anything available at our local supermarkets. It certainly deserved its Great Taste Awards! We’ll be working our way through the other packs through the winter.

The bauble retails for £2 (it would make a nice stocking stuffer) and the bags of beads are £4.99 each (270g each). Hans Sloane hot chocolate can be purchased at Tesco, Waitrose, some independent shops and through their website.

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