Sweets for the Sweet - Valentine's Day Hot Cocoa Mix

Since X started preschool this year, I've been searching for cute, unique and inexpensive gifts for his teachers for the various holidays throughout the year. At Christmas, the lead and assistant guides (Montessori lingo for teachers) got my homemade extra spicy cranberry pepper jelly. The red jelly looked so festive in the little jars I just had to label them and off they went to school as sweet (and spicy) little holiday gifts.

With Valentine's Day swiftly approaching, I've been agonizing over whether a simple card would suffice from the Kid or if we should try to do something a little extra for the special people in his school life. Finally, in a truly forehead-smacking moment ("D'oh"), it occurred to me. Why mess with success? Another gift from the kitchen would be just the thing for Valentine's Day. And so, on the night before a snow storm, X and I hit the grocery store to shop for one of our favorite ingredients - CHOCOLATE!

We started with Abby Dodge's recipe for Instant Hot Cocoa Mix and after taste-testing a few cups (oh the sacrifice!) we made a few adjustments. Instead of plain sugar, we used powdered sugar and we used 70% cocoa solid chocolate bars. You can find the full recipe here.

Make sure you include mixing instructions.

Any recipe that calls for using the blender is a BIG HIT with the Kid. He had a blast pouring the ingredients in, breaking up the chocolate bars (getting a taste as he went), and then pushing the button on the blender to make it all go "whirrrrr!"

Once we made our final batch, we measured out the mix into individual serving sizes. Then we poured them into some sweet little cello bags I found at Tar-jay and, with the addition of a fold-over tag custom-designed with a special message from X (and mixing instructions), we had beautiful and tasty homemade Valentine's - sweets for the sweet!

We packaged ours with inexpensive mugs - a thrifty, tasty gift!