Morning Mocha

There's a local breakfast restaurant that serves up a delicious coffee drink that they call a "Rose-a-Rita Mocha".  It's delicious!  It's has a unique chocolate, coffee, cinnamon flavor with a bit of a grainy texture.  It sounded really good this morning but we decided not to go out.  So, I got creative and tried to make some at home.  It was a success!

All I had to go on was the flavor that I remembered and the name.  We had ingredients that I thought might work....Mexican chocolate, coffee, "milk" (I used rice drink while hubby and daughter used coconut milk...we've gone non-dairy), cinnamon, and I cooked up a new batch of vanilla simple syrup.  I posted a recipe for the simple syrup a couple of years ago...just click HERE.

Hubby had bought the Mexican chocolate a few months ago to try and make hot chocolate that didn't have corn syrup in it.  He didn't have much luck with it though.  It's a box with packets like this...

Inside each packet is a round chunk of chocolate with pie shape lines to break it evenly.  It's hard to break and even harder to melt.  Even when he broke it into small bits it would only partially melt in the hot milk.  It turned the milk into a speckled, chunky mess.

I had an idea this morning that worked!  I used a cheese grater and ground half of a disk into a fine, sandy texture.  I heated half a cup of unsweetened rice drink, added the chocolate, and swirled it around over the heat.  It melted in nicely and turned into a rich, dark brown liquid.

Meanwhile, I brewed a dark batch of coffee in my French Press as hubby brewed decaf in his.  And, we heated up some coconut milk and rice milk.  When the coffee, chocolate, syrup and "milk" was ready we started making our cups of mocha.  We stirred together:  eight ounces of coffee and eight ounces of hot "milk", about two tablespoons of the liquid chocolate, about one tablespoon of vanilla syrup and a dash of cinnamon.  Wow!  It was so good!  It was at least as good as what we've had at the restaurant...maybe even better.  And, it didn't have the sandy texture it does at the restaurant.  The dash of cinnamon made it perfect.  We'll definitely be making this again!