How to Make Hot Chocolate

Weigh out 4 oz of semi-sweet or dark chocolate. Downshiftology looks for something in the 50 to 60 percent range, which has enough cocoa to taste like chocolate without turning bitter once the milk softens it. Bars and chips both work.

Set the chocolate on a cutting board and rock a chef's knife through it until the pieces are small shards. Size matters more here than it looks like it should. Big chunks sink, sit on the bottom of the pan and never fully dissolve.

Pour 4 cups of milk into a saucepan and set it over medium heat. Any milk works here. Downshiftology has made this with close to every kind there is and uses cashew milk in the video.

Fat is what separates a good cup from a great one. Whole milk and coconut milk carry the most, so they give the thickest result. Skim and most nut milks come out lighter but still taste like real hot chocolate.

Tip 3 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder onto the warming milk. This is the ingredient people drop once they hear the drink has real chocolate in it, and dropping it is a mistake.

The melted bar brings body and richness. The cocoa powder brings the sharp, dark note that sits on top of it. Together they read as layered instead of flat, which is the difference between this and a mug of sweet brown milk.

Measure 2 tablespoons of maple syrup, or honey if that is what is in the cupboard, and stir it into the pan. That is the whole sweetener.

Most hot chocolate recipes call for half a cup of sugar. Downshiftology argues on camera that it is too much, because the chocolate bar already carries sugar of its own and a 50 to 60 percent bar was never bitter to begin with. If you came for the standard American version, half a cup of granulated sugar is the usual swap.

Keep the whisk moving as the pan heats. You are working the cocoa powder into the milk until there is not a lump left in it, and the heat does most of that job for you. Clumps that refuse to break up cold fall apart on their own as the temperature climbs.

Stop when the surface reaches a gentle simmer and starts to froth around the edge. The froth is fine. It is your signal that the milk has hit the temperature the chocolate wants.

Tip the whole pile of chopped chocolate into the pan at once and keep whisking. Inside a few seconds it looks like it has melted, and the color slides from light brown to a deep dark brown.

It has not finished. Keep whisking at a simmer for a full 5 minutes. That is what gets the last shards into suspension instead of leaving a gritty layer of chocolate in the bottom of your mug.

This part is optional. Pour cold heavy cream into a chilled glass bowl and run a hand mixer through it until it holds soft peaks that flop over when you lift the beaters out. Two minutes, no more.

Coconut whipped cream behaves the same way if you are keeping the whole thing dairy free, and marshmallows are a fair substitute for anyone who would rather have those. Our guide to whipped cream covers the timing and what to do when you overbeat it.

Take the pan off the heat and pour. Four cups of milk fills four decent sized mugs. Stop short of the rim when toppings are going on, because a full mug plus a spoon of whipped cream ends up on the counter.

Add the cream in dollops, then dust cacao powder over the top through a fine mesh sieve. Downshiftology does the dusting over a plate so the cocoa that misses the mug lands somewhere she can wipe.