Anyone who has sat on a British beach blue with cold will know that nothing beats a flask of hot chocolate, regardless of how it is made – so long as it is creamy and sweet.
Yet sip on a cup of the truly good stuff at, say, Chocolate Tree in Edinburgh (which does special cups of its own bean-to-bar chocolate in milk, ranging up to 85% dark) or Paul A Young in London (which makes its without milk, just Valrhona cocoa powder, 70% chocolate and muscovado sugar) and quite how much that seaside setting dictates your levels of enjoyment will be thrown into perspective.
So, when you are neither on holiday nor willing to spend a small fortune at a fancy cafe, which are the best machines out there for making hot chocolate like a pro at home? I tested five to find out.
Tassimo Vivy 2 (Bosch, £99.99)
Having never used a home-brew machine of this kind, I opened it to find it came with no ingredients. After buying some Tassimo pods, I stared at the manual. It may be because Bosch’s target audience is multinational, but the instructions were all symbols – no text – and, damn, I could have done with some written instruction.
I fiddled about with the Vivy like an octogenarian with an iPhone until my friend looked up a YouTube tutorial. Several mind-numbingly monotone minutes later, I knew what a T-disc was and where to put it, only to realise I hadn’t bought the milk ones I needed to go with the chocolate ones I had. Out I went again to purchase another eight-pod pack of T-discs.
In fact, I didn’t get straight chocolate: I got Oreo. If you are going to use a machine that makes a hot drink with opaque plastic pods and a tankful of water, why not go full tilt? Also, this summer’s heatwave led to my five-year-old discovering Oreo ice-creams and, if I’m honest, they are not half bad. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the hot chocolate version. It was disgusting.
Tassimo’s other chocolatey guest brands sound more promising – Cadbury, Milka and Suchard offer compatible pods – but it was too painful to figure out, too potentially disappointing to taste and, mostly, too much landfill to bin to try again.
Ease of use: 2/5 (The instructions are much too complicated to figure out, but once you have the hang of the machine, it is easy; too much unavoidable wastage)
Quality of drink: 3/5 (Decent froth; hot; no real milk or chocolate; cost of ingredients dictated by machine)
ChocOlé hot-chocolate maker (Grunwerg, £17.05)
It is not that price necessarily dictates quality, but in this instance I think it might. This is a cafetiere-style glass jug with a handle, lid and base made from plastic. You gently heat milk in a saucepan, then pour it into the jug, add hot-chocolate mix and plunge the lid down repeatedly until, as the blurb specifies, the hot chocolate is thoroughly mixed in and a frothy consistency is achieved – or, as my mugful attests to, a thin, lukewarm drink topped with a middling layer of bubbly froth is obtained. It costs only £17, but why spend even that much for something this underwhelming? Whisking by hand, directly in the saucepan, would have made the same hot chocolate, only hotter.
Ease of use: 2/5 (Milk must be heated separately, so more washing up; feels flimsy)
Quality of drink: 2/5 (Too thin; too cooled; bad frothing)
Velvetiser (Hotel Chocolat, £89.99)
Hotel Chocolat may have dreamed this up, but Dualit designed it, which means it comes with its signature magnetic whisk and a snug-fitting lid; it also sits, cordless, on a kettle-style power base. You pour in the raw goods (milk of your choice, plus 35g chocolate flakes), put on the lid and press the button. Minutes later (2min 39sec for whole milk; 2min 18sec for almond), the subtle purring stops. You remove the lid and, holding the pleasingly old-school milk-pan-esque side handle, pour out liquid velvet: chocolate melded exquisitely into cloud-like lactic froth.
The Velvetiser launches next month and the marketing spiel is eye-roll-inducing – the machine is billed as an “in-home drinking chocolate system” and its name becomes a verb, promising “velvetised drinks” and “perfect velvetising” – but that drink, though. It made me smile, it made me dance, it made me velvetise. Yes, it is an expensive, space-gobbling, single-cup, single-use gadget, but it is a very pretty one – available in eminently millennial colours (copper, matt charcoal, white). And while Hotel Chocolat is keen for you to use its single-serve pouches, I tried other hand-grated chocs, cacaoand even honey. Pourable silken pile, one and all.
Ease of use: 4/5 (No extra washing up, easy to clean, easy and near-silent to operate – but branded chocolate flakes are expensive)
Quality of drink: 5/5 (Hot; perfect frothing; real milk and chocolate)
Milk frother and hot-chocolate maker (Gourmet Gadgetry, £38.24)
A cordless electric jug that sits on a power base and makes hot and cold drinks. You pour milk in up to the one-cup or two-cup mark and add powdered, grated (a whopping 84g is recommended for two servings), or, as the manual suggests, Gourmet Gadgetry fondue and fountain chocolate (I opt for grated Green and Black’s). The metallic red design is meant to recall a retro diner, but it looks more like a cheap car.
But that is nothing compared with the leakage that ensues when I do exactly as instructed to make a two-cup batch. “DO NOT overfill the machine,” yells the manual. “I DIDN’T,” I yell back, mopping up hot brown milk from table, chair and floor.
My daughter and I share what is left in the jug and it is not too shabby: high-speed mechanical stirring definitely achieves better froth than manual plunge-pumping. “Two points,” is my sidekick’s verdict. “But,” she continued, “the pink one (see below) is 100 points.”
Ease of use: 3/5 (Instructions are misleading; easy to clean; noisy to operate)
Quality of drink: 4/5 (Great frothing; hot; real milk and chocolate)
Coco chocolate stove (La Cafetiere, £26.94)
This was my favourite: an old-fashioned aluminium stove-top jug with a plunger lid to pump and froth and a protective silicone mat. The instructions are nicely loose and straight: you fill the pot up to just below the bottom of the handle, preferably with whole milk (semi or skimmed won’t froth so well) and gently heat on the burner (gas or electric) until the milk is bubbling around the edges, then add in your chocolate – the manual suggests a cocoa mix (I use Cadbury’s powdered hot chocolate) or a grated handful of real chocolate – quantities unspecified – and stir.
You then put the pot on the silicon mat, replace the lid and pump up and down. “We have found,” the manual states, “frothing whilst you count to 20 creates optimum results.” I did – and they were. I tried 70g of Prestat’s new ruby chocolate flakes in 600ml of whole milk and obtained two superlative steaming mugfuls of thickly creamy, pale-pink velvet, with no leakage to speak of.
Ease of use: 4/5 (Easy to use; great instructions; slightly tricky to clean)
Quality of drink: 5/5 (Perfect frothing; hot; real milk and chocolate)
