High Fat Hot Chocolate

High fat hot wha?! I know. But think about it: butter tastes a lot better than margarine, bacon can doom a vegetarian much more easily than pork, and low fat cheese is a meaningless blight. But high fat cocoa? They make that?

Yes they do. And you need some. Now.

This is one of those beautiful moments where I'm shopping at Whole Foods, and something catches my eye, and I only notice afterwards that it's also flagged with a little yellow 'Sale!' sticker. I was going through the bulk section, scrounging up cheap grains (I bought some mixed rice and yellow split peas, though they might be lentils - I don't know, they were 29 cents for 100 g, so I didn't ask too many questions. They'll go well in the curry I'm planning for tonight no matter what they are, I hope), and out of the corner of my eye I saw the deepest, richest, most ineffably beautiful shade of brown I ever saw outside of a garden. I am not prone to liking brown, but this was the color of purple that has blistered and autumned and rotted into a divinely distilled richness. Naturally, I was intrigued. What could this be? Surely not a flour.

No, it was no flour. It was labeled "High fat cocoa". I opened the lid. A smell like the inside of a box of chocolate truffles wafted up in a billow of decadence, grabbed me by my tweed lapels and yodeled opera in my ears. I closed the lid. The clutch vanished. Was that even real? Curious, I raised the lid again, and once more the scent had taken ahold of my jacket and sang something in unintelligibly vibratoed Italian. I knew I had found the finest of all sins, and it was there for the taking.

I bought too much. No, that's a lie. I bought too little, but it cost me enough to think I might have overdone it. In scooping it out of its bin, a little powder stuck to my fingers, and until I got home and washed, my hands smelled like love. I made some hot chocolate out of it: 1 large tablespoon of cocoa, 2 tablespoons of light brown sugar, and boiling water to taste (16 oz for this amount is what I use). You can add milk, it wouldn't go amiss. But you don't need to. You could add cinnamon, that would be delicious. But you don't need to. All you really need to do is savor every sip of this, because it is truly delectable.

Kate