Sunday May 05, 2013

0
I've been drinking the heck out of this recently: Cocoa, or her half-sister with coffee, Mocha.



I mix mine strong, and one big bowl of the stuff is my breakfast of choice on recent days that I have writing to do. It puts me in a brainstorming and creating mood like nothing else. Could be it's the energy in it: Enough calories to serve as a meal replacement, with complete proteins in the mix too. It could be the drug-like effects: cocoa is loaded not only with sugar, but also with caffeine, theobromine, psychoactive amines, and who knows what else. The Aztecs and Mayans called chocolate "the food of the gods" and built their empires on it. No wonder why.

My breakfast recipe looks like this:

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

  • In a small pot, heat 2 cups milk.
  • Meanwhile, in a large soup bowl, mix two heaping tablespoons of cocoa powder, and a lesser volume of sugar. Give those a quick mixing with a spoon, then add a splash of milk to the bowl: Just enough to bring the mix to being a thick paste, when mixed with the spoon.
  • Pour the now hot milk over the cocoa paste. Sip carefully and add more sugar if needed.
  • Add spices to taste. 3 hard shakes of cinnamon and 2 of nutmeg are good in my book. Alternately, chile is a traditional cocoa spice.

Makes one large soup bowl brimming with strong, dark spiced cocoa.

My current favorite ingredients are goat milk over cow's milk, "Rapunzel" brand organic cocoa powder, and turbinado (i.e. raw) sugar over plain white sugar. I'm using the Trader Joe's store brands for the turbinado, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and am happy with that.* Cayenne and ancho are two of the more popular chiles to mix into cocoa.

If Tim Ferriss is to be believed, the cinnamon will slow the digestion of the sugar, making it less of a rush and more of a healthy sustained burn. Nutmeg, at higher doses, is known to be another psychoactive, so it may be contributing more than just flavor to the mix.



Cocoa and Mocha: Are you a fan? What's your favorite recipe?

= = = = = = = = = = =
*

SPOILERS! (Click to view)
I've tried many variations on the recipe along the way: I can say that coconut flower sugar is vile in cocoa, and that good quality baking caster's sugar is wasted in the recipe; the turbinado has the right hint of flavor. The Trader Joe's store brands, while good for the spices and sugar, are not recommended for the cocoa. Whichever plantations they're blending theirs from, I found the results to be sour when mixed strong.

Hot chiles in cocoa are a classic flavor combo that I need to experiment with more.



SPOILERS! (Click to view)
Cross posted with the Coffee & Tea Group.

VIEW 9 of 9 COMMENTS
mneylu:
Not in those words so much, more like, I've been studying the radicals and their origins and what not and how they expanded later to make more words and combine and what not. So, I'm working on the written, not the spoken, traditional chinese.. smile
mneylu:
Not sure. Not all of them have an origin we can sort out.. but If you remind me somehow once I get my Radical text out of storage it seems pretty legit. "What Radical Is that?" the charts are sweet.

More Blogs