It’s night six of Hot Chocolate Week! Only one more day to go and… I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull off tomorrow’s big finish. But that’s something for me to worry about tomorrow. Tonight I have Williams-Sonoma Hot Chocolate to hold my attention and let me tell you – it is very worth the attention.

So I went to the mall to get some Godiva hot chocolate mix. I wanted something to round out the week and figured that would fit the bill nicely. But I can’t go to the mall without sticking my nose into Williams-Sonoma to look at all the pretty toys I would so love to have in my kitchen. And what do I see as I walk in the store? Hot chocolate of course. It was about then that I remembered that I had been carrying around a W-S gift card since my birthday and just never got around to using it. Well, that changed quickly enough. A big can of hot chocolate mix and Gale Gand’s new cookbook, Chocolate & Vanilla, went home with me and I ended up not setting foot one in the Godiva.

Not that it wouldn’t have gone home with me without the gift card. One look at the ingredients is all it would have taken. They are, in their entirety: bittersweet Guittard chocolate, soya lecithin, and pure vanilla. Oh, my. It’s virtually all chocolate. How wrong is that? There’s no hope for microwave instructions for this one. The can says to heat a cup of milk and whisk in 5 tablespoons of chocolate mix and stir until it’s all dissolved. What you are left with is a beautiful deep brown with a nice chocolate aroma with not a hint of sweetness. The taste is, as one would expect, deep chocolate. The milk softens the bittersweet chocolate a little and makes it very smooth and mellow without making it any less rich. This is some darn good hot chocolate and I’m calling it an 8.75 out of 10. I have a suspicion that if I substitute cream for some of the milk it could be even better.

That’s six nights of hot chocolate down and one BIG night left. I have six hot chocolates on deck for the grand finale. I’m not really sure I can manage to knock off six hot chocolates in one day. Time will tell, I suppose.