Voila! How to Serve Up Some Hot Love

If you are looking for a wonderful activity with kids, your lover, or a group of adults, you should check out Voila! While we aren't close enough to report on their chocolate making parties, everything we've heard and read suggests it would be a blast. But what we can do is tell you about their House Blend Hot Chocolate Mix, one of a few chocolates you can order from them online or pick up in their New York City shop. Hot chocolate can be a fun couples activity so with Valentine's Day approaching, I thought it would a great time to share my experience of this product (and my hubby's) with you all. Viola Chocolat sent me this product to test and write honestly about so that all of you could learn about them; no other form of compensation was received.

The ingredients are simple in this "Vintage Hot Chocolate" -- cocoa beans, pure cane sugar, cocoa butter, sunflower lecithin, soya lecithin, vanilla beans, whole milk solids, and vanilla powder. Keep these in mind because this equals 72% cacao. As you can see the hot chocolate is basically tiny pieces of chocolate along with powered milk. When I opened this canister up, I noted a cinnamon scent yet no cinnamon or spices on the label. This made me very curious as to what the flavor of the hot drinks were going to be.

According to directions you mix 1/4 cup of the chocolate with 1/2 cup milk. That ration for two servings looks like this. We use only skim milk or powdered milk in my house. I grew up that way and my husband doesn't like the taste of higher fat milks.

You heat your milk up first then stir in the chocolate. Stir it vigorously, very vigorously, so you get all of the chocolate to melt. With similar hot chocolates I've noticed you have to keep stirring from time to time even after you put it in your mugs.

Then pour into glasses to serve! Guess what? That cinnamon fragrance was correct. This had a very unexpectedly strong cinnamon flavor. This can only mean that where these cacao beans were grown has soil that imparted this flavor. It will taste like cinnamon and have a bit more heat kick to it than you might expect but we loved it! We found that if you drank if fairly quickly, you didn't need to stir it again but still there was a bit of settling. I'm not sure how to fix that other than to keep stirring and stirring before pouring but since the form was the pieces of chocolate I think it wants to return to that state as it cools. It was a great way to share time together. Get some Voila House Blend Hot Chocolate to try it out for your Valentine's Day.