Kitchen Misadventure (St. Lucian Hot Chocolate)

It's getting cold outside.  And wet.  And miserable.  And frosty.  And dark.  I really hate that part of winter.  I'll be better when there's actual snow, and it feels Christmasy.  That part of winter I actually like.  It's this in-between transition from fall to real winter that sucks.

So in order to warm ourselves up from the recent temperature drop, Alex and I thought we'd bring out a reminder of our St. Lucian honeymoon, specifically, making hot chocolate from a stick of chocolate bought in St. Lucia.

Epic.  Fail.

See, we took this tour on our last full day that was absolutely incredible.  Snorkeling. Sightseeing.  Volcanoes.  Mud baths.  Rainforests.  Waterfalls.  And cocoa beans.

I'd never seen an actual cocoa bean before so this was pretty neat.  And at our last stop, there were these sticks of pretty much pure chocolate you could buy with directions on them to make hot chocolate.

We started by grating some of the cocoa stick into a powder:


Boiling water, milk, and brown sugar:

Adding cinnamon, a bay leaf, and nutmeg, then boiling for 5 minutes (according to directions).  Ours kind of looked like mud, so we kept boiling and adding a little more milk... a little more sugar... in hopes of making something remotely appetizing, but it still looked like this:

Yum?  Not.  In the end, we scrapped the whole pot, made some regular, powdered, American style hot cocoa, and looked at honeymoon pictures....

Sigh....

Is it too much to ask to go back?  Right now?