Warm Up with the Richest, Creamiest Cup of Hot Chocolate – Garden & Gun

Your drinking chocolate, says Danielle Centeno, is only as good as the chocolate you use to make it. She would know—she’s been operating Escazú, a craft chocolate shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2008, sourcing beans from all over Latin America but primarily from her native country of Venezuela. 

Though Escazú specializes in chocolate bars and confections—the bestsellers are a sea salt bar and a milk chocolate bar accented with goat milk powder—the shop also serves hot beverages, including a drinking chocolate. “It smells like brownies,” Centeno says of the decadent drink. “It’s thick, but not quite as thick as ganache.” 

The most important part of the recipe is the chocolate itself. “Use chocolate from your favorite small, bean-to-bar chocolate maker,” Centeno says. Opt for a bar made of just cacao and sugar and maybe a third ingredient, cocoa butter (the fat of the cacao bean). “This hot chocolate recipe is meant to showcase the flavor of the chocolate, not mask it,” she says. “The magic is in the chocolate—choose a bar that you know you enjoy and it will most likely make a delicious cup of hot chocolate.” 

From there, you can get creative; buy a bar with a higher cacao percentage, between 75 and 85 percent, and omit the sugar from the recipe; try a single-origin chocolate to really let its distinctive flavors shine; play with the milk-to-chocolate ratio to find your preferred creaminess level. And the staff at Escazú, including Centeno’s business partner, Tiana Young, like to throw in some extras, including a pinch of cayenne powder for spicy kick, peanut butter to make it more filling, cinnamon for depth of flavor—or, even better, all three together. As Centeno says, “it’s as much instinct as science.” 

A sprinkle of cayenne pepper powder.