Homemade Chocolate Syrup

OK! We bought 1/2 gallon of vanilla ice cream to go with all the hot fruit desserts. But, sometimes there is just no substitute for a dish of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. Just like when you were a little kid. Or a glass of cold chocolate milk. (Chocolate or Strawberry is actually the only way I will drink milk. Ugh, cow juice!)

The milk thing goes back to my early childhood. My mother, gods love her, was all about saving some money. Growing up in the 70's, meatloaf meant 1/2 TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein, remember that?) and...to save milk...she made 1/2 gallon of evaporated milk and mixed it 50/50 with regular milk. (She did this late at night after we were asleep, as she knew we would INSTANTLY say, "No way!" if we knew. Guess what? We knew.)

That was actually one of the ONLY battles I won as a child. I HATED the milk. There were many nights of, "You are not getting up from that table until you drink your milk!" I sat at that table until bedtime. She finally asked our pediatrician in desperation what to do. His response? "Does he eat a balanced diet? Does he take a childrens multivitamin? Does he eat cheese? Don't make him drink it then!" Score one for enduring loathing!

So, I looked in the fridge and realized that we were almost completely out of chocolate syrup. With the reading of the ingredients (first thing? High Fructose Corn Syrup), I decided to look around and see if I could find something else. I mean, how hard could it be, even with the corn syrup, the ingredients are nothing!

I found this recipe from "The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Dacyczyn. Hrmmm, this looks really easy! And I can use our fair trade, evaporated organic cane sugar! We found this stuff at Costco. LOVE it! It melts and dissolves beautifully, measures the same. It tastes sweet, but somehow not AS sweet and a LOT better. I don't think we will change to anything else. Granted, it was about 8 bucks for 10 pounds...not a LOT more than just sugar.

Here goes...how EASY is this?

1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Mix the cocoa and the water in a saucepan. Heat and stir to dissolve the cocoa. Add the sugar, and stir to dissolve. Boil for 3 minutes over medium heat. Add the salt and the vanilla. Let cool. Pour into a sterile glass jar, and store in the refrigerator. Keeps for several months. Yields two cups.



It's delicious! And pretty rich, you do not need much for a glass of chocolate milk, maybe a teaspoon!

Oh, and use at least a 2 Quart sauce pan. This WILL boil up. I now have to clean the burner and drip pan on the stove. What a mess. Although, the caramelized/burning sugar and cocoa smelled kind of good! (I would have taken a picture, but the camera had powered down and it was a choice of stopping the fiasco or waiting for the camera to power up. Guess which I chose?)

This fit perfectly into a molasses bottle saved from the ginger bread baking at Yuletide.

So, maybe 15 minutes of your time and you have a really nice chocolate syrup that, yes, it is still almost pure sugar, but...it's REAL sugar...and I really have no problems with real sugar, other than we all eat too much of it. But...if you want some chocolate syrup, you want some chocolate syrup!

Try it! Let me know what you think? I know I won't buy this stuff again!

Just tried it now that it's fully cooled. The only change I would make...I doubled the salt from 1/8 to 1/4 tsp...for me that tiny bit of extra salt brings out the taste. Perhaps it's the organic sugar, but I will go 5 minutes on the boil next time, it's DELICIOUS but just a TOUCH thin, not terribly noticeably more than the store bought, but...OMG it's good!