HotCocoa

Ingredients

• 1 Cup Dutched Cocoa Powder
• 2.5 Cups Dry Nonfat Milk Powder
• 2 Cups Granulated Sweetener
• 3 Teaspoons Corn Starch
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• 1/4 - 1/2 Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper

Makes about 22 eight-ounce servings.

Making the Mix

Preheat oven to 300. Line two cookie sheets with parchment. Spread milk powder evenly across both sheets. Bake milk powder for 20 minutes, swapping the sheets' locations in the oven halfway through to ensure even cooking.

Use a food processor on the sweetener plus corn starch. Give it at least 30 seconds on the highest speed. This will pulverize the sugar and the corn starch will keep it from clumping so it will dissolve more easily in hot water. If you use confectioner's sugar, reduce the corn starch by 1 teaspoon. Keep the corn starch in even if you use sucralose or other fake sugar - besides acting as an anti-caking agent, it also adds body to the hot cocoa.

When the milk powder has cooled, run it through the food processor. It will have baked into a big crumbly solid. Turn it back into a fine powder.

Mix everything together. I put everything back in the food processor and ran it on the highest setting for another 30 seconds, but that was at the limits of my food processor's capacity. Improvise as necessary, making sure the salt and cayenne get evenly distributed throughout.

Store in an airtight container.

Making a Cup

To make hot cocoa: Put 1/4 cup of mix in a mug, add 2 oz boiling water, and mix the ever-loving-crap out of it with a fork until it is glossy and smooth with no clots of powder stuck to the mug or floating around. Then add another 6 oz of boiling water.

Commentary

30 calories of corn starch and the sweetener are the bad parts. I used sucralose, but who knows what that chemical is doing to my insides.

1/22 of a teaspoon of salt isn't much per serving.

Dry nonfat milk is OK at 10 calories per gram of protein.

Cocoa is good for you. Fiber, protein, and antioxidants.

The toasted milk powder will be golden brown and will taste very different through a combination of maillard reaction and caramelizing.

The cayenne is a big win. I used 1/2 teaspoon, and it isn't dominant, but you can really tell it's there.

Works great in coffee, but if I'm not going for caffeine I just drink it with hot water. It doesn't need the coffee flavor.