Hot Chocolate On A "Stick"

When I saw the idea of making hot chocolate on a stick on Giver's Log I just had to try it! My only complaint was that the sticks used were too...umm, shall we say, plain? I immediately knew just how I wanted to do mine. 


Introducing...flavored hot chocolate on a stick!


Flavor Number 1 - Cinnamon Hot Chocolate
I followed the instructions given except I used a cinnamon stick in place of the craft/popsicle stick and sprinkled a little bit of cinnamon onto the chocolate that I dipped the cubes into. 

Flavor Number Two - Peppermint Hot Chocolate
How stinkin' cute are these! I super love them! They are so cute I almost had a hard time putting one into my heated milk...almost. It was divine! It had just the right amount of peppermint for me. And the nice thing about using the candy cane as the stick is that if someone prefers a stronger mint flavor they can just stir more of the candy cane in. 
My variation - use candy cane (cut off the crook part of it) for the stick, dip hot chocolate cube into melted white chocolate and then dip in crushed candy cane. 

I also tried making a Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate. I had never seen this before and yet in every other type of dessert is seems that chocolate and peanut butter get paired together, so why not hot chocolate? I'm still tweaking this version. It had WAY too much peanut butter in it, but it wasn't bad if mixed with a plain hot chocolate cube. 


Here are a few suggestions if you plan to make these on your own: 1. place your ice cube tray into very shallow hot water for a few seconds to loosen the cubes once they are set up. Don't get the water onto your chocolate cubes. I had a hard time trying to get mine out at first (I actually broke one of the candy cane sticks) and this helped a ton! 2. The recipe says to use 8 servings of prepackaged hot chocolate mix in case you don't want to make them from scratch. I don't know if my hot chocolate packs were larger than most or what, but I found that to be WAY too much. For my second batch I measured out 3/4 C of hot chocolate mix and had much better results.