No Milk Hot Chocolate

Even though this recipe doesn’t call for milk, cream or milk powder, you do not miss it. The creaminess comes from two aspects of this recipe. We reduce the mixture in the sauce pan over the heat which thickens up the hot chocolate and we add tahini off the heat. Which is whisked into the mixture, this not only adds a frothy layer on the top but also emulsifies the oil in the tahini into the hot chocolate making it very rich and velvet like smooth. So tahini is basically ground up sesame seeds, any nut or seed butter is ground in its raw state which releases the natural oils that make it a paste. Hence the oils here create the creamy texture we are after. 

If you don’t have any tahini (I love the flavor combination of tahini and chocolate) you can use any nut or seed butter that you like. I’ve tried making this with peanut butter and it tastes like a snickers hot chocolate. I would avoid the sesame seed garnish in that case and add a few toasted peanuts. The recipe is so simple you don’t need much to make it, hence there aren’t many substitutes apart from the ones mentioned above. You can absolutely add vanilla like I did or even a splash of brandy, rum and coffee liqueur to spice things up further.