CHOCOLATE! The one who makes hearts beat, whether passionate or disappointed, happy or sad, chocolate is like that BFF who we need to be always close, the one who celebrates with us but who also wipe up our tears…

And from the 1001 ways that we have to eat chocolate, one of the most famous is Hot Chocolate! Who is a fan of chocolate, can not resist to a beautiful mug of hot chocolate. Creamy, smooth, delicate and sensual, it runs through the guts and leaves us with that feeling of almost levitation! You know what i mean, right?

But when this hot chocolate hype has started? History tells us that the human being began to drink a kind of hot chocolate 500 BC! Yes, you read well! 500 years BC the Mayans drank what they called xocolatl, the ancestral version of hot chocolate, made from ground cocoa beans and mixed with water, fine corn flour and pepper, and then poured from one container to another until create some foam. It was not a sweet beverage, obviously, and it was not consumed hot either.

Xocolatl was also the beverage of choice for Aztec warriors. It was part of their military rations, a kind of pressed ground cocoa biscuit, which later easily transformed into an elixir of energy by mixing it with water.

When the Spanish people conquered the Aztec lands, in the 16th century, cocoa obviously did not go unnoticed. They quickly imported it into Spanish lands, as well as that chocolate beverage, and it was there that the adaptations to the recipe began to transform it into something much more similar to what we know today. The Spaniards began to consume the beverage hot, and instead of peppers and spices, they started to add sugar.

The Spanish people kept cocoa and this incredible drink a secret for about 100 years, but obviously such a wonder would not be able to hide for much longer. Thus, cocoa began to spread throughout Europe and in the mid-1700s, the “chocolate houses”, equivalent to our coffee shops, began to become super popular and frequented by politicians, writers and the cream of society in general. The President of the Royal College of Physicians, Hans Sloane, brought with him a recipe from Jamaica that consisted of mixing chocolate with milk, thus making Aztec drink even more delicious!

The recipe for the hot chocolate drink has evolved, as the chocolate industry itself, but the recipe is not the same worldwide. In the United States, for example, hot chocolate is not as thick as what we know and is often made with hot water mixed with powdered chocolate.

Summing up it doesn´t matter if it is more or less thick, what really matters is that be sweet and cozy and take us to Wonderland!

So close we are to the day when love is celebrated, in its most varied forms, I couldn’t resist bringing to you the perfect recipe to celebrate that date. With a partner or just by yourself, what really matters is to have chocolate to make everything perfect!