Warm yourself up with Josefina’s favorite breakfast treat! We’ve had a really weird winter down in the Mid Atlantic, and I can’t decide if this is just how it is, or if I’m getting an up close and personal look at Global Warming, but in either case, here we are. I never know how to dress before leaving for work in the morning. This means I often end up waiting on the metro platform after work for a train that never arrives wishing I’d thought to pack my scarf or wear tights, or slowly suffocating in my wool coat and gloves. Since it’s still technically winter no matter what the temperature might say, I figured it might be time to feature an official American Girl recipe I’ve been eying for some time. This treat definitely helps take the edge off the cold, while being tasty enough to enjoy no matter what the weather’s doing outside. Chocolate is native to Central and South America, and there are lots of tasty hot chocolate recipes straight from and inspired by that region, as well as the Southwest United States. I made one of them a few years ago – read all about champurrado, the classic beverage or breakfast treat. Josefina’s Cook Book gives a little bit of background information into the history of chocolate, explaining that the ancient Mayans and Aztecs considered chocolate to be the food of the gods because it made them feel good and provided long lasting energy. They used vanilla and chiles to flavor their bitter chocolate drinks. The Europeans began to sweeten it with sugar in the 1500’s. Josefina’s family would have gotten their chocolate in the form of sweetened, hardened wafers from Mexico City. Although the Montoyas are fortunate to have traders from Mexico City roll into town relatively often, it’s still something she probably wouldn’t have been munching on every day after her reading and writing lessons. ETA: One of my awesome readers (the person behind the famous Super Inky!) shared a really fascinating part of chocolate history that often goes untold. Did you know that Native peoples were trading for chocolate and other goods with folks in Central America long before the Spanish showed up? An archaeological study at Chaco Canyon identified artifacts that proved that ancestors of the Pueblo (and therefore the ancestors of Josefina's friend, Mariana) drank the same liquid chocolate enjoyed by the Mayans and other Mesoamerican communities. The New York Times did a really fascinating piece on the discovery in 2009. Although I'm not surprised this story is still often left out of chocolate narratives, I'm bummed that it is, because it's a really interesting look at how vast trade routes were before Europeans arrived in the "New World". A lot of discussions of Native communities place them in a regional bubble, rather than acknowledging how interconnected the Americas were before they were "discovered." I'd really recommend giving the article a read! The cookbook says that this recipe is something that Josefina and her sisters would enjoy for breakfast as a special treat, which sounds like a nice addition for a day of working on the rancho. Although New Mexico doesn’t see a ton of snow the way my home state does, it can still get chilly in the winter, meaning this was probably a treat Josefina appreciated before going out to collect water for any winter laundry or cooking she was helping out with. That said, I might like mine better as a treat after coming in from the cold… To start off, you put 5 tablespoons of cocoa, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/8 teaspoon of nutmeg, a pinch of salt, and 1/3 of a cup of honey in a pan. This can take a while to mix together, but it’s pretty obvious when it’s combined the right way. You’ll end up with a sleek brown mixture. When that’s finished, add 1/2 of a cup of hot water and stir well. I boiled some in my tea kettle and let it sit for a while so it hot, but not boiling when I poured it in. Turn on your stove’s burner to medium high and stir the mixture constantly until it just starts to boil. Turn down the heat to a low, low simmer for about 30 seconds before adding in 4 cups of whole milk. Stir it constantly over medium heat for about two minutes, but don’t let it boil! Remove the saucepan from the burner and put it on a trivet or damp towel. Stir in one teaspoon of vanilla, and using either a whisk or a rotary beater (or if you want to get really authentic, a molinillo), beat the hot chocolate “until it is very frothy.” The cookbook explains that when the Spanish brought vanilla to Europe to recreate the New World chocolate drink, Europeans realized that vanilla was a delicious flavor by itself. That’s a discovery I’m pretty happy about. Call me lame, but I really love vanilla. Well, I got lazy – and I’m not sure it would have frothed up as well as it could have anyway because I used one cup of skim milk, three cups whole – so my chocolate didn’t come out especially frothy. But I did add a small sprinkling of cinnamon on top just before serving. I don’t have the New Mexico Starbucks You Are Here mug yet, but my best friend did send me two from Texas for Christmas, and since Josefina was her childhood doll, it seemed fitting to break out the Austin one for this post, don’t you think? I was really pleased with this recipe. While I was first mixing the honey, chocolate, and spices, I was really reminded of Heritage Chocolate, which is always an exciting association to make. The final product wasn’t quite as spicy (or rich!) as Heritage Chocolate hot chocolate, but it was still really flavorful, sweet without being too sweet, and really hit the spot as an after dinner treat. The cookbook claims this makes about four servings, and I did manage to get decent portions into 14 oz coffee mugs, so it would be an easy to serve beverage for a small gathering with large mugs, or divided into smaller cups for a larger group of friends. I think this would be a great addition to any Josefina or American Girl themed party you might be planning, or just a fun twist on your average hot chocolate. Even though I’m crossing my fingers for an on time arrival for spring, I think I can handle a few more weeks of winter if I’ve got a mug of this to look forward to! Hope you're all keeping warm too!
Y es que el chocolate es una de esas bebidas que siempre darán una satisfacción culinaria para disfrutar entre los diferentes amantes de sus sabores.
Mexican-style hot chocolate with cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla extract is a tasty, quick, and comforting drink.
An adaptation of one of the oldest recorded recipes for hot chocolate! We've done a lot of talking about hot chocolate on this blog, as well as chocolate in general. I've provided a review of American Heritage chocolate, tried out the official Josefina approved recipe for New Mexican hot chocolate, toasted marshmallows on top of hot chocolate, and even tried out champurrado, a recipe with links to some of the earliest ways human beings have enjoyed chocolate. The recipe we're trying out today is one of the recipes featured as part of the Folger Shakespear Library's First Chefs exhibit, which I've also shared with you guys before. All the recipes featured online and as handouts at the exhibit were adapted from historical recipes by Marissa Nicosia, a food historian who experiments with recipes from the 1600's through the 1800's. You can read more about her work on her website Rare Cooking. So, what makes this recipe different from the ones we've tried before? Well, first off, most of the other recipes I've made don't really result in something that can be packaged up and gifted to people as part of a very late holiday gift swap, which was part of my motivation for trying it out. I've never made my own hot chocolate mix before, and I was eager to see if this could become a standard gift to offer people, as well as something handy to have around when you have company in the winter. (Theoretically, anyway. It's been so hot this winter that hot chocolate has been the furthest thing from my mind on most days.) The other reason I was intrigued by it is the very flashy history the Folger Library and Marissa Nicosia uncovered in this recipe. The original recipe that inspired this adaptation isn't exactly a recipe at all, but rather a description of traditional methods of preparing cacao for consumption as a frothy, thick beverage by Native communities in the Americas. It was described by William Hughes in his 1672 book The American Physitian. Who was William Hughes? A botanist who also happened to be a pirate. Or a pirate who happened to be a botanist. Hughes first visited the Americas in the 1630's or 40's, and his book offers readers one of the first eyewitness accounts by an Englishman of cacao planting and production. He provides descriptions of plenty of other edible plants in the book, but his section on cacao is the longest section by far. Until this point in history, most of England's upper classes had regarded chocolate suspiciously, but his engaging description may have helped them warm to the idea of the interesting drink. By the time Felicity was growing up, hot chocolate was becoming more and more affordable for the British, and hot chocolate became an important substitute for tea when American Patriots refused to drink tea in protest of England's new tax laws. George Washington even enjoyed drinking hot chocolate, and Martha Washington was fond of steeping cacao shells in hot water to make a more tea-like beverage. Nicosia's adaptation of William Hughes's recipe is my favorite kind of recipe: toast your cacao nibs, dump all the ingredients in one bowl, mix together, blend, serve mixed into hot milk. Very little fuss, and not too much by way of clean up, especially if you've got a dishwasher safe blender. Early hot chocolates frequently featured spices we find either strange or exotic in chocolate today, like nutmeg or hot peppers, and Nicosia encourages readers to tweak the flavor profile depending on what your personal preferences are. I'm in agreement with her, as although the standard recipe is definitely nice and flavorful, I wanted more spices in it to make it taste closer to the chocolate produced by American Heritage Chocolate. If you're interested in following along, the recipe is available on the Folger Library's website, or you can just toast 1/4 of a cup of cacao nibs until they're shiny and smell very chocolatey, then add them to a bowl with a 100 gram 70% dark chocolate bar which has been roughly chopped, 1/2 of a cup of cocoa powder, 1/2 of a cup of sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1/4 of a cup of plain bread crumbs (this will make the drink authentically thick), and 1/2 teaspoon of chili flakes. I also added two teaspoons of cinnamon and nutmeg for some extra spicy flavors. Pulse this in a blender until they're combined "in a loose mix" per the recipe's instructions, and you're ready to start making hot chocolate. The recipe makes approximately two cups of mix, and recommends you use three tablespoons per one cup of hot milk. You should be able to get a good amount of servings in with your batch or be able to adjust accordingly pretty easily if you're planning on hosting a big crowd, or otherwise need a lot of mix to distribute to folks. Or yourself. No judgment here. My only complaint is that the chocolate bar melts with the heat of the blender whirring, so it can get kind of lumpy even if you're making your best attempt at blending everything equally. Otherwise? This is a really great recipe, and I'd definitely recommend giving it a try yourself! Let us know if you do!
With a repertoire of 50+ recipes inspired by the unique stories of 17 favorite American Girl characters, this beautiful cookbook invites young chefs to develop basic kitchen skills while preparing sweet and savory sharable treats. From Josefina’s Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies to Rebecca’s Potato Latkes, Melody’s Strawberry Icebox Pie to Luciana’s Cosmos Doughnuts Pies—this collection of kid-friendly recipes covers a wide range of flavors to satisfy kid chefs of all skill levels. This perfect gift for American Girl fans features colorful pictures of the dishes and characters interspersed throughout the pages and will keep kids engaged and curious.50+ RECIPES: Learn to make baked goods, from cookies to muffins to celebratory cakes, plus savory snacks like hummus with veggie dippersTREATS FROM EVERY ERA: From Rebecca’s early 20th century New York Cheesecake to Blaire’s Homemade Fruit Leather LEARN COOKING TIPS AND TRICKS: Master measuring, rolling, frosting, and decorating!INSPIRING IMAGES: Full-color photos help ensure successOFFICIAL AMERICAN GIRL COOKBOOK: The trusted partner for families who want to raise strong, confident girls and help girls discover their sense of self
This mocha mexicano is full of warm spices, and packs a subtle punch thanks to a little cayenne pepper. It’s inspired by ingredients from Rodelle Vanilla and Taza‘s Fire Puncher chocolate. This summer, my vegan & paleo strawberry ice cream was a runner-up in Rodelle Vanilla‘s Great American Ice Cream Contest, and the prize was […]
Explore littlespicejar's 3272 photos on Flickr!
An adaptation of one of the oldest recorded recipes for hot chocolate! We've done a lot of talking about hot chocolate on this blog, as well as chocolate in general. I've provided a review of American Heritage chocolate, tried out the official Josefina approved recipe for New Mexican hot chocolate, toasted marshmallows on top of hot chocolate, and even tried out champurrado, a recipe with links to some of the earliest ways human beings have enjoyed chocolate. The recipe we're trying out today is one of the recipes featured as part of the Folger Shakespear Library's First Chefs exhibit, which I've also shared with you guys before. All the recipes featured online and as handouts at the exhibit were adapted from historical recipes by Marissa Nicosia, a food historian who experiments with recipes from the 1600's through the 1800's. You can read more about her work on her website Rare Cooking. So, what makes this recipe different from the ones we've tried before? Well, first off, most of the other recipes I've made don't really result in something that can be packaged up and gifted to people as part of a very late holiday gift swap, which was part of my motivation for trying it out. I've never made my own hot chocolate mix before, and I was eager to see if this could become a standard gift to offer people, as well as something handy to have around when you have company in the winter. (Theoretically, anyway. It's been so hot this winter that hot chocolate has been the furthest thing from my mind on most days.) The other reason I was intrigued by it is the very flashy history the Folger Library and Marissa Nicosia uncovered in this recipe. The original recipe that inspired this adaptation isn't exactly a recipe at all, but rather a description of traditional methods of preparing cacao for consumption as a frothy, thick beverage by Native communities in the Americas. It was described by William Hughes in his 1672 book The American Physitian. Who was William Hughes? A botanist who also happened to be a pirate. Or a pirate who happened to be a botanist. Hughes first visited the Americas in the 1630's or 40's, and his book offers readers one of the first eyewitness accounts by an Englishman of cacao planting and production. He provides descriptions of plenty of other edible plants in the book, but his section on cacao is the longest section by far. Until this point in history, most of England's upper classes had regarded chocolate suspiciously, but his engaging description may have helped them warm to the idea of the interesting drink. By the time Felicity was growing up, hot chocolate was becoming more and more affordable for the British, and hot chocolate became an important substitute for tea when American Patriots refused to drink tea in protest of England's new tax laws. George Washington even enjoyed drinking hot chocolate, and Martha Washington was fond of steeping cacao shells in hot water to make a more tea-like beverage. Nicosia's adaptation of William Hughes's recipe is my favorite kind of recipe: toast your cacao nibs, dump all the ingredients in one bowl, mix together, blend, serve mixed into hot milk. Very little fuss, and not too much by way of clean up, especially if you've got a dishwasher safe blender. Early hot chocolates frequently featured spices we find either strange or exotic in chocolate today, like nutmeg or hot peppers, and Nicosia encourages readers to tweak the flavor profile depending on what your personal preferences are. I'm in agreement with her, as although the standard recipe is definitely nice and flavorful, I wanted more spices in it to make it taste closer to the chocolate produced by American Heritage Chocolate. If you're interested in following along, the recipe is available on the Folger Library's website, or you can just toast 1/4 of a cup of cacao nibs until they're shiny and smell very chocolatey, then add them to a bowl with a 100 gram 70% dark chocolate bar which has been roughly chopped, 1/2 of a cup of cocoa powder, 1/2 of a cup of sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1/4 of a cup of plain bread crumbs (this will make the drink authentically thick), and 1/2 teaspoon of chili flakes. I also added two teaspoons of cinnamon and nutmeg for some extra spicy flavors. Pulse this in a blender until they're combined "in a loose mix" per the recipe's instructions, and you're ready to start making hot chocolate. The recipe makes approximately two cups of mix, and recommends you use three tablespoons per one cup of hot milk. You should be able to get a good amount of servings in with your batch or be able to adjust accordingly pretty easily if you're planning on hosting a big crowd, or otherwise need a lot of mix to distribute to folks. Or yourself. No judgment here. My only complaint is that the chocolate bar melts with the heat of the blender whirring, so it can get kind of lumpy even if you're making your best attempt at blending everything equally. Otherwise? This is a really great recipe, and I'd definitely recommend giving it a try yourself! Let us know if you do!
Featuring more than 50 recipes, this cookbook blends the beloved stories of 17 American Girl® characters with easy-to-make items that teach essential kitchen skills. Young chefs can master measuring, rolling, and decorating while making an array of sweet treats as well as savory snacks like hummus with veggie dippers.
The time for hot chocolate has begun! And I love it. Now a days I am pretty much open to try different flavors. I love how many different types of hot chocolates there are. My favorite thing about drinking hot chocolate is adding marshmallows, but not any kind, those little tiny ones that you see on the photos, those are THE best! And they don’t sell them just anywhere, I had to order them online and now we have a huge bag of them, perfect!! Today Nestlé is offering 4 containers of Nestlé Abuelita Chocolate, this chocolate is not what I was used to at all, in Venezuela this kind of chocolate is not typical. Abuelita chocolate is very mexican and now that I’ve tried it I like it! It has more spice to it and a not-so-sweet taste which I love cause I can’t really drink something so tremendously sweet. My favorite thing to do with it for me and for Adrian is drink the hot chocolate but I do want to try using it more in some cooking, desserts or even other recipes. Nestlé is also offering a mexican molinillo from Dean & Deluca, have you seen these? They look so fancy! […]
Braise pork ribs with a homey, vegetable-rich sauce with a touch of heat, and use the leftovers for tacos.
A dessert that's both fancy and humble! Boiled desserts are something that fascinate me. They used to be as American as apple pie, but sometime after we broke free from Great Britain, puddings started losing their appeal, and now they're something of a novelty only, and most modern cooks - including me! - can be a little intimidated by them. There's plenty of reasons for that: they're heavy, take a fair amount of time to make, and the flavors and textures can be a hard sell to American audiences who aren't quite sure what to make of them. Today, I'm sharing my first ever attempt at a boiled dessert, straight from the recipe archives of Colonial Williamsburg. These interesting dumplings might have graced the table of anyone from Felicity to Governor Dunmore, and were definitely an interesting culinary experiment. Read on to see how it went! This recipe was published on Colonial Williamsburg's food history blog History is Served. This blog doesn't appear to be updated all that often anymore, but it holds a special place in my heart because one of their recipes - for Sugar Cakes - was a source of inspiration that led to me creating A Peek into the Pantry! To Make Raspberry Dumplings is adapted from a recipe out of Hannah Glasse's 1796 cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. The original recipe is published alongside a modern adaptation, which includes detailed instructions. There's also a short video showing an interpreter making the dessert. I was excited to give this a try for another reason besides my curiosity about boiled desserts. The interpreter explains how this is a dish that would have been pretty accessible to anyone, as just about anyone in the colonial period could have stumbled across a patch of raspberries and decided to turn them into a dessert. The other ingredients are very straight forward as well: flour, a lot of butter, eggs and water, with a little sugar for dusting. Yes, it would probably have appeared more frequently on the table of a wealthy plantation owner like Grandfather, but a family living in more humble circumstances could have enjoyed something like this too. Food of the upperclass is generally what has been preserved in cookbooks and other sources in this period, so it's always fun to find a recipe that would have had a broader appeal in the time period. To get started, you need to make your pastry. Williamsburg advises making your own pastry from scratch, but notes you could use store bought pie dough if you'd rather. As I'm a glutton for punishment, I was excited to try making my own puff pastry following their instructions. I cut half a pound of butter into a pound of flour, working it with my hands until it was well incorporated, but also trying not to over do it so some butter would remain in nice chunks that translates to light, fluffy pastry. Next, I beat an egg and added half of it to a cup of cold water before adding it to the flour and butter. This was a part I was sort of estimating, because something about the HTML of the original recipe from Williamsburg is busted, so it's hard to tell exactly how much water they want you to use here. My dough came out looking fine once I rolled everything together, although it was a little wet. Dusting it with some flour solved that problem pretty quickly. I rolled the dough out and cut up 4 ounces of butter into small pieces before layering them over the dough. I then folded the dough over this and rolled it out, then repeated the process with another 4 ounces of butter. The dough was reasonably easy to work with and felt pretty fluffy, although it did require some flour to get it on and off my granite counter-tops. Roll the dough to be about 1/4 of an inch thick, and then spread on your raspberry jam. You could easily make this with any other jam or fruit spread you've got on hand if you don't like raspberries, although fair warning, this will require quite a lot of it to cover the whole pastry. I used a whole jar of fairly pricey jam, so just prepare yourself. Now comes the difficult part: rolling it up without causing a giant mess. Once it's rolled, you're going to want to wrap it up in the cloth you're going to boil it in. The recipe recommends using an old bed sheet, but we didn't have any we were willing to sacrifice, so we used a dish towel we hoped we'd be able to get clean again. This was the hardest part of the recipe, as while rolling it up, my jam almost all slid out, and I had to wake Jess up from a pretty deep sleep to help me transfer my log of pastry into the tea towel. It was a lot bigger than I thought it would be, and it was extremely unwieldy to hold. I was genuinely worried I was going to rip the whole log in half if I didn't move fast enough. After getting it onto the towel, I rolled it up and tied it at the ends and in the middle with cooking twine. The recipe tells you to tie the ends very tightly, but keep the knots around the middle more gentle so you're not cutting through the pastry. You're going to need a good sized bit of cloth for this, as our dish towel almost didn't cover the whole pastry log. I'd also again recommend using something you're not that attached to, as the raspberry stains didn't come out of the dish towel as much as we would have liked them to. Once it's all wrapped up, the dumpling tube needs to go in a large pot of "gently boiling" water, with enough water in it to cover the dumplings entirely. In the video, the interpreter uses a pot used for poaching fish, which is long and thin so you don't need to fold the dumpling in on itself. I didn't have something similar to this, so my dumpling got awkwardly bent in a circle to fit in my pot. Next time, I think I'd like to try making a few smaller logs to let them cook without doing yoga in the pan. The dumplings cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Getting it out was again something of a challenge. The recipe instructs removing it from the pan with two tongs, but mine was so long and heavy that again I was worried about the pastry ripping into pieces as I fished it out. I ended up awkwardly dragging it out of the pan and putting it on a plate/cutting board to cool for 15 minutes. Unwrapping it was... upsetting. The pastry stuck to my towel and ripped in pieces, and a lot of the jam fell out. Initially, I was really worried I'd ruined it, but Jess reassured me by poking around in the ends as I tried to clean up the mess and proving that it had actually cooked and the texture wasn't bad. It just also got stuck to our tea towel and tore a little. Jess wonders if I should have used more flour to dust on the tea towel to create a sort of barrier that would protect the dumpling as it unrolls. The recipe asks you to slice the pastry into five equal cylinders, set them on a plate with the pinwheel facing up, and to drizzle butter and sugar over it before serving it. Plating in the colonial period was everything, and keeping dishes symmetrical and pretty turned your dinner from a simple family meal to a formal gathering. Well, that was never going to happen with ours, so I cut as nice a slice as I could manage and plated it. Didn't come out looking too bad, right? One of the comments on Williamsburg's post about these dumplings is complaining that the texture is gluey and they don't understand what they're doing wrong. I genuinely have no idea why anyone would look at the instructions for this recipe and think they were going to wind up with anything that wasn't a little gluey and wet, because it boils in a pot of water for an hour before you get to eat it! So the texture might not be for everyone. However, I genuinely really liked it. Hot out of the pan, it was particularly tasty, although it was super, super rich. Slathering it in butter and sugar just made it more so, and while it tasted good going down, it made me feel super, super heavy and full after only eating a little bit of it. Initially, this really surprised me, because Williamsburg explains that this would be a dessert that was served after a heavy meat course to cleanse the palate and give you something lighter to enjoy, and this was anything but light! But then I realized I was being a total idiot, and went in with very different expectations for this dessert that I should have, making me no better than the folks who complained about how gluey it was. Now, I want to be clear on one thing: this really shouldn't be a summer dessert, and it's on me for being a stubborn idiot and making both Jess and I feel like bloated messes after eating this. Keeping the fire hot enough to boil the dumplings for an hour would have kept the kitchen absolutely sweltering in Virginia in August, and the pudding is absolutely not the sort of thing your body wants to be processing while you're already desperately trying to keep cool. Keeping the butter cool enough to roll out the pastry at the height of summer would also be a nightmare in a colonial kitchen, as you don't have air conditioning to help keep the room cool, and depending on your status, you probably wouldn't have a marble slab to roll it on either to help keep the temperature down. It also uses jam, which makes me think this would be a way of recapturing summertime flavors long after the world had gone into hibernation for the year. All that said! I did genuinely enjoy the end product and the process of making it. Next time, I'd want to make sure I had a large group of people to help me eat it, as we had a ton left over that now neither of us really wants to eat. I'd also probably divide my dough in half and make two logs to boil rather than twisting it in on itself, as that definitely didn't help my plating issues... and do it in winter. I also couldn't help but notice that my version came out a lot bigger than the one featured in the video from History is Served, which makes me wonder what on earth I did to my pastry to make it swell up so much. It tasted really good, genuinely pretty similar to a potsticker texture and flavor, but it got really big and fluffy in a way the others didn't seem to. Overall, despite some hiccups, I'm glad I gave this one a try! Hope you enjoyed seeing us try to bring some early American fare to life. And I guess we need to think about buying a fish pan!
