Salted Spice Caramel Hot Chocolate and Munich's best chocolaterie

You know those winter days when you come home after a bad day at school or work, frozen to the bone, craving nothing but warmth and comfort? Well, then this is exactly what you need: A good steaming cup of hot chocolate. With all the necessary knickknacks to make it an almost religious experience and to make you forget your troubles.

Hmm, maybe I should open a chocolaterie? As in Chocolat. Oh, that'd be lovely...

Salted Spice Caramel Hot Chocolate

Serves 2

750 ml/24 fl. oz. milk

75 g/o.5 cups chocolate (I love Simón Coll's Xocolata à la pedra, but any good(!) dark chocolate will do)

8 cardamon pods

1 vanilla pod

1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbsp golden caster sugar

1 generous pinch of pepper and chili

Crush the cardamon pods and extract the seeds, scrape the vanilla seeds out of the pod. Put the cardamon and vanilla seeds and the empty vanilla pod into a pot, add the sugar, salt and chocolate and pour in the milk.

Heat it all up, stirring constantly until the chocolate has melted, then remove the vanilla pod. Season with chili and pepper, and serve hot. You could also add a decadent spoon of whipped cream or rum for that extra bit of comfort. As you please.

A cup of that stuff has almost the same effect as going to the Götterspeise: It makes you feel like everything is going to be all right. The Götterspeise (Food of the Gods) which, in my humble opinion, is the finest chocolaterie in all of Munich, is a fairly small but incredibly beautiful shop, and the chocolates they sell make you weep with joy and your credit card groan with exhaustion. Every time I'm there, I'm seriously tempted to spend half my monthly salary on chocolate. Wouldn't be hard.
You can also enjoy a variety of hot chocolates, almond milk and other fancy comfort drinks right there and have a slice of one of their obscenely delicious cakes to go with it (my favourites are raspberry white truffel tart and chocolate ginger cheesecake). A sip. A bite. A smile. Everything is going to be fine, oh yes it is going to be fine.

 

 The chandelier is gorgeous, don't you think? I especially like the stucco. As for the rest: No talk. I think the pictures speak for themselves...