About two months ago, I discovered anew how much I like hot chocolate. I ordered it one morning on a whim—I’d been standing in the coffee shop queue looking desperately at the menu, wondering what I could possibly order that wasn’t coffee. I didn’t want tea and I didn’t want chai (my intense love affair with chai lattes seems to have burned itself out after about 6 months of too much sugar and spice). I like the ritual of something warm in the mid-morning, but in lieu of coffee, the pickings are slim. With breakfast, I always have a mug of hot water with lemon which satisfies the “wrap-my-hands-around-something-hot” craving without requiring any decision about flavor or style. There’s no fussing over cappuccino versus latte or almond milk versus regular.
Enter: hot chocolate. Yes, I know it has always existed on menus. Yes, I realize I could have been drinking it for years. But it just never occurred to me. Past the age of say, six, hot chocolate seems like a whimsical order. A luxury on a frigid winter’s day. A dessert in drink form.
And it can be. It’s often extremely sweet and extremely rich, which is a bit much for 10 AM. I like it when it tastes more of cocoa then of chocolate: milky and comforting and almost nutty. My advice? Ask a coffee shop to use a little less chocolate than usual, which ends up being just about right.
Or, make it yourself! This brings us to today’s lesson, which is that it’s extremely useful to learn to make homemade versions of pretty much everything you like. You can customize things to your taste (and be a bit more frugal). There’s a time and place for ordering out and eating out, but I like knowing that I could just as easily replicate my favorites at home.
For me, I’ve landed on the perfect hot chocolate method. First, I whisk together raw cacao powder with a pinch of salt, a little vanilla extract, and some maple syrup or date syrup. I add a little hot water, whisking it to make a paste. This is key! If you add the powder directly to hot milk, it’ll never smooth out and you’ll end up with dry lumps of cocoa. I make a triple batch of the chocolate paste and use it over a few days.
Next, I heat up some almond milk and stir a spoonful of the paste into the milk. Separately, I foam some 2% milk in a milk frother and spoon dollops of the foam over the cup of chocolate-y almond milk.
Does this sound fussy? Yes. But here’s why: almond milk (unsweetened) is creamy without being too rich, and it’s really nice in hot chocolate. But it doesn’t foam well compared to regular milk, and a thick cap of pillowy foam is…frankly…something worth waking up for. Plus, calcium. So there you have it.
But this is not merely a long-winded ode to hot chocolate (or is it…). It’s rather a way of getting at the point that I find it empowering to recreate at home the things I taste out in the world.
One such thing: the carrot loaf at Irving Farm Roasters. Irving Farm is a little coffee shop near me. In addition to being a cozy place to stop for a drink, they have a very excellent food menu. They used to make one of the best tuna salad sandwiches around, and they have a pretty perfect breakfast plate of roasted sweet potatoes, avocado, scrambled eggs, and greens. You can get overnight oats soaked in coconut milk with a drizzle of honey and fat juicy blueberries buried through the jar like hidden gems. You can get a warm sourdough panini filled with grilled chicken and pesto and gooey mozzarella. Their vegetarian sandwich (hummus, sprouts, carrots, avocado, Swiss cheese, and roasted tomatoes on multigrain) is habit-forming. I’ve yet to discover the secret to their tangy chicken salad—chunks of grilled chicken tossed in some sort of bright and barely creamy sauce. Bliss.
And that’s just the main menu—the bakery case is an entirely different story. Sourced from various top-notch bakeries around New York, the options range from dense, nubby morning glory muffins to plump, glossy Danishes with a slick of berry jam. They have Rice Krispie treats as big as your hand and oversized, pillowy doughnuts stuffed with chocolate and stacks of cookies in flavors like chewy molasses ginger and gluten-free peanut butter and oat. My favorite though? The carrot loaf. I stumbled upon this once late in the afternoon when the case was starting to empty out. Hungry and tired, I asked for the first thing I saw, which was a massive slice of a quick bread loaf. Flecked with orange bits of carrot, it was as dense and moist as a very good banana bread but with a more subtle flavor. There was a hint of spice (cardamom, I thought? cinnamon?) and I detected some kind of kick, like ginger.
I liked it so much that I ordered it again and again. Eventually, I asked the barista where it came from, and she informed me nicely that it was from a wholesale bakery in Brooklyn called Margaret Palka Bakes. As it turns out, Margaret Palka is a fantastically talented baker who has been supplying coffeeshops and restaurants across New York with superlative baked goods for decades. She recently published a cookbook, which I obviously bought immediately.
Her recipe is actually a carrot zucchini loaf. And it’s good! But I could never quite replicate the results at home. My spices tasted heavy-handed. The crumb was too leaden and a little gummy. It just wasn’t right.
I gave up on the project, until recently! Last week I made the very excellent Earl Gray yogurt loaf from Bon Appetit, and loved it. A few days later, I found myself with an excess of diced carrots from a savory rice porridge recipe I’d been making for dinner.
Hm, I thought. Carrot loaf?
Using the Bon Appetit recipe as loose starting point, I tinkered about and created a batter. Most carrot cake or bread recipes will tell you to shred the carrots, but mine were already diced, so I went ahead and minced them a bit more finely and used those.
I was about to add classic carrot cake spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, and so on—but then something made me stop. Could I do something else? Almond extract, maybe, would work. Or what about citrus? I wondered. I had a little lemon zest, so I added that, and then instead of vanilla extract I used a hefty dose of fiori di Sicilia.
Fiori is a seriously magical ingredient. Get some immediately! It’s a blend of citrus and vanilla, typically used in Italian sweet breads. If you use enough of it, it’s a strong flavor in its own right. But if you add just a bit, it gives this incredible depth of flavor to pound cakes and any other vanilla or citrus recipe. People can never tell what it is, but they always seem to like those baked goods more.
The combination of carrot and yogurt yielded a perfectly moist crumb. It gets even better the next day. I baked my loaf in a Pullman pan which I highly recommend purchasing—if you bake a standard quick bread recipe it in, it’ll create a much taller, straight-sided loaf…just like ones you see in bakeries instead of a shorter more squat and rustic-looking loaf that a 9” x 5” pan creates.
Note: If you don’t have fiori di Sicilia (which you can buy here), just sub 1/2 teaspoon lemon oil and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (instead of the 1/2 vanilla extract I used).
Carrot Yogurt Loaf
Makes one 9” loaf
3 cups (360g) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup (150g) sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon fiori di Sicilia
zest of one lemon
1/3 cup (80ml) vegetable oil
1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (Greek will work but regular is better)
1 cup finely diced carrots
raw sugar, for finishing
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Grease, and line with parchment, a 9” Pullman loaf pan or a 9” x 5” loaf pan.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
In a stand mixer, whisk together the eggs and sugar until pale and fluffy (this should take at least 1 minute on medium-high speed. Add the vanilla, fiori di Sicilia, yogurt, and lemon zest and mix.
With the mixer running on low speed, slowly drizzle in the vegetable oil, mixing until well-combined.
Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
Gently fold in the carrots, then pour the batter into your prepared pan.
Sprinkle a generous layer of raw (turbinado) sugar over the top.
Place the pan in the oven and bake for about 1 hour. After 20 minutes, turn the temperature down to 325 degrees F. Start checking the cake around 50 minutes. It’s ready when a tester or knife inserted into the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs—you shouldn’t see wet batter clinging to it.
Let the loaf cool in the pan for 10 minutes or so before using the parchment to lift it out onto a wire rack (or just flip it out). Finish cooling on the rack before slicing.