Homemade cocoa and milk chocolate

Step-by-step cooking

1. Step 1:

   

   Measure out the ingredients for making homemade chocolate. Success depends on the quality of your cocoa. Do not cook a large portion for the first time - test it. Ready-made mixtures for the preparation of Nesquik-type cocoa are not suitable here. This chocolate just won't harden. I take cocoa in boxes with a Golden label strictly from the company Red October. It will turn out delicious with Belgian cocoa Callebaut - this powder has a very rich color and taste. Beware of fakes!

2. Step 2:

   

   Cut the butter into small cubes so that they melt faster in milk.

3. Step 3:

   

   Pour milk into a saucepan, add sliced butter. Put a saucepan on a small fire and bring the milk to a boil. But don't boil it! !!! The exact amount of milk depends on the quality of your cocoa powder and its density. Therefore, I give a minimal approximate calculation. It took me a little more milk for the whole powder than indicated in the recipe, but it's better to add more later than to pour out a lot of milk at once and understand that the mass turns out to be liquid.

4. Step 4:

   

   Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir the mixture until all the butter has dissolved.

5. Step 5:

   

   Pour sugar into the hot milk and stir until it dissolves. With this amount of sugar, you will get not very sweet chocolate, something in between bitter and dark. If you need sweeter chocolate, add 1.5-2 times more sugar.

6. Step 6:

   

   Pour in the cocoa powder.

8. Step 7:

   

   Mix until smooth. If the mixture turns out to be too viscous and lumpy, boil about 50-80 ml of milk on the stove and gradually pour into the chocolate mass and stir. Do this until you get the right consistency.

9. Step 8:

   

   You should get a shiny homogeneous mixture, thick, like very fatty sour cream and do not drain from the whisk. What to do if you immediately poured a lot of milk and the mixture turned out to be liquid and fluid, like icing and you understand that such chocolate will not harden. The easiest option is to add more cocoa. But if there is no more cocoa, then you need to return such a mixture to a slow fire or to a water bath and, with constant stirring, boil it to the desired consistency.

10. Step 9:

    

    Pour more hot chocolate mass into the molds. You can use candy molds or just pour the chocolate on a baking sheet lined with parchment and smooth it out. I used silicone molds for Viennese waffles to get tiles of a beautiful texture. Cool the chocolate at room temperature.

11. Step 10:

    

    Put the chocolate molds in the freezer for 2-3 hours until completely solidified.

12. Step 11:

    

    Remove the finished tiles from the molds and you can enjoy natural chocolate of your own making. It is worth considering that such chocolate melts quickly, because there are no stabilizers and other chemicals in it, which are added in production to preserve the shape of chocolate bars. Enjoy your meal!