Lavender Hot Chocolate

Rob Kingsbury: Hi! I am Rob Kingsbury with Kingsbury Chocolates and today we re making delicious lavender and pistachios infused hot chocolate. I already have a nice whole milk preheated here but you can use any kind of milk you want, skimmed, 1%, 2% even soy milk; it makes no difference. For chocolate, I am suing a nice rich semi-sweet, but also your preferences are your own, if you want to use white chocolate, milk chocolate even a more bittersweet chocolate, that s fine as well.

So to make this lavender and pistachios infused hot chocolate first of all I am going to be making a single size serving, for me that s 12 ounces. So I am going to put 12 ounces of hot milk right into my measuring cup, and then from there I am going to be sprinkling in some beautiful, beautiful lavender from Provence. It s the whole buds that I ll be putting in here and I am going to be putting one teaspoon of the lavender in here. If you have a tea bowl at home where you could put the buds inside of it and let then soak into the hot milk. That s also an option, but for those of you at home, they don t have that just stirring a lavender in is a great way to do it and then I d like to let this steep for about two minutes. A nice way just to keep all the wonderful flora aromas into the milk is just put a piece of a saran wrapper at the top of that.

So, while that is steeping, I am going to go ahead and I ll chop up my pistachios. So you can do this by hand if you d like with the cutting board or knife, another quick and easy way though is just to take your pistachios nuts and put it into your coffee grinder. So I have a coffee grinder here that I specifically only use for doing a non coffee bean chopping, no matter what that spice or herb or flower might be. So, just a couple of quick pulses on this and we ll have some ground pistachios nuts. Great, and for this recipe I am using salt roasted pistachios because I love the blend of salt and chocolate together.

All right, so our milk is been steeped and infused with lavender, and I am going to strain this directly into my serving cup and this will just hold the buds from getting mixed into the rest of this, and then to that I am going to add a one cup of chocolate shavings, and whisk away. When you get a nice froth on the top you know your chocolate is well blended. That looks beautiful. A nice scoop of a fresh whipped cream goes on the top and then over the top of that, I am going to sprinkle my pistachios nuts.

Cool, and besides being a really interesting flavor combination we d like the floral tones of the lavender and the salt roasted pistachios, it s a beautiful, beautiful cup of hot chocolate to enjoy as well. And up right after this I am going to show how to do a chipotle and cinnamon infused hot chocolate. Cool, enjoy.