A simple hot chocolate sauce

Who doesn’t like ice cream and hot chocolate sauce? So simple, but effective and delicious. You get many different recipes for this, including using cream, using real chocolate, using different sugars and syrups, which I am sure are all very delicious indeed. The choice is overwhelming when googling for a recipe for hot chocolate sauce. So this recipe is scaling everything down. A simple hot chocolate sauce using only a few ingredients and always tasty.

The recipe is from a South African recipe book – Kook en Geniet – (English version is called Cook and Enjoy It) which is such a reliable recipe book with wonderful little nuggets about cooking and baking. It represents authentic South African food, culture and heritage and the author of Kook en Geniet, S.J.A. (Ina) de Villiers, published the first edition in 1951 in her private capacity because South African publishers were not interested. But then from 1972 onwards Human & Rousseau publishers took it over and these days it is the most successful South African cookbook ever.

And, did you know “cacao” is the seed from which chocolate is made and “cocoa” is an ingredient in chocolate. Cocoa powder, which is used in this sauce, is an unsweetened chocolate product. I think it adds more chocolate flavour to this dessert than a bar of chocolate would, because it doesn’t have that extra sweetness. The cocoa butter gets removed from the cacao beans during processing to make the powder. Read more about the process here.

Here is the recipe:

Chocolate sauce for ice cream

Ingredients:

• 250 ml (1 cup) sugar
• 50 ml (4 tbsp) cocoa
• pinch of cream of tartar
• pinch of salt
• 125 ml (½ cup) water
• 12,5ml (1 tbsp) butter
• 2,5ml (½tsp) vanilla essence

1. Mix the first four ingredients together, add the water and boil for 5 minutes.
2. Stir in the butter and let it cool down a bit.
3. Add the vanilla.
4. Serve warm with ice cream.

It really is that simple.

Enjoy.

 

Slán