Keto White Hot Chocolate

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White hot chocolate is something special — and a delicious twist to your regular mug of hot chocolate. And white hot chocolate is not only for carb consumers: this very low-carb variation is perfect for ketoers, or anybody who wants to avoid sugar. Scrumptious and satisfying, it contains only real, wholesome ingredients. You can use any natural sweetener you like. My favorite in this recipe is stevia glycerite, but for example, powdered erythritol or luo han guo (monk fruit) are also great options.

Tips for making the Keto White Hot Chocolate

Choosing high-quality cacao butter is the key to the best taste. There are some cheap and unpalatable cacao butters over there, so be sure to invest in the best quality and preferably organic cacao butter. It pays off both in better taste and fresher, healthier fats. Never use rancid fats as those cause inflammation in your body. Talking about fats: this tasty drink makes also a great, liquid fat bomb for keto dieters!

I strongly recommend vanilla powder instead of vanilla extract in this recipe for more genuine vanilla flavor. So, for the best result, get some pure ground raw vanilla beans. However, if vanilla extract is all you have, by all means, use it.

Here’s how to prepare the Keto White Hot Chocolate. By the way, these photos are taken in the summer house where we spent some days last week (like you can read from my long story at the end of last week’s post). In that post, you can see our CEO Olli K. cooking, using the same stovetop I also used to prepare this Keto White Hot Chocolate and shoot the photos. If you check the post, you can see it’s very dark over there, so I had to edit the photos drastically (I’ll show you the comparison between one raw and one edited image at the end of this post).

Here we go. Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan. That is, the almond milk…

…heavy cream…

…your high-quality cacao butter…

…stevia (or your preferred sweetener to taste)…

…and vanilla powder.

Heat over medium heat, continually mixing…

…until piping hot. Don’t let boil.

Now, you might think your Keto White Hot Chocolate turned into a disaster as the grease floats nastily on top…

…but here’s the trick on how to get a delicious, smooth, and slightly foamy consistency: blend the mixture with an immersion blender or in a regular blender.

Voilà! Here’s your smooth, creamy, and tasty Keto White Hot Chocolate!

Enjoy! (Notice how the Keto White Hot Chocolate matches the mug!)

 

My Keto White Hot Chocolate experiments

I often make simple 3-ingredient keto hot chocolate using just dark cocoa powder, heavy cream, erythritol crystals, and hot water. It’s a great, warming drink and kills sweet cravings before they even start. However, this time I wanted to get some twist to my plain old hot chocolate and was pondering over different spices. I’ve made wintery versions using cardamom, cinnamon, and vanilla, but they didn’t feel exciting enough. Then, I suddenly realized white hot chocolate was just the exciting variation I was after.

However, finding clean keto ingredients to prepare white hot chocolate wasn’t that straightforward. After some thinking, I expected I need cacao butter, vanilla powder, and sweetener – preferably stevia.

For the liquid, I chose a combo of almond milk and heavy cream as I thought pure almond milk would make the drink too runny and void of fat, while using only heavy cream would have made the drink too fatty as I was going to add also cacao butter that is pure fat itself.

After pondering the amounts, I decided to use 1 cup (240 ml) unsweetened almond milk, 1/2 cup (120 ml) heavy cream, 1 oz (30 g) cacao butter, 10 drops stevia, and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla powder.

I heated all ingredients until piping hot. To my devastation, the melted cacao butter was floating on top, gathering into unattractive, tiny, yellow-colored droplets. Jeez! What a disaster. Instead of smooth and creamy consistency, I got ugly and greasy substance. I was already about to pour my weird concoction away, but then realized I could at least try what happens if I blended the mixture with an immersion blender. It definitely cannot turn any worse!

Using the full speed, I started blending the greasy liquid. In less than a minute, it had turned into a smooth and silky white hot chocolate with a beautiful off-white color. Wow! My disappointment turned into delight. Now, if this drink only tastes as good as it looks, it’s a real winner!

Excitedly, I tasted the drink. Hmm. The taste was good, but something was missing from the flavor. When I prepared the drink in the summer house for the guys, they liked it, too, but I think they also thought it would benefit from more taste.

At home, I shot the video and did some more experiments. This time, I increased the amount of cacao butter, stevia, and vanilla powder. Now, there was enough taste in the drink — it was simply heavenly!

As an R&D person, I still had to conduct another test: I cooled down the mixture into fridge temperature (actually outside, where the temperature is currently precisely the same as in our fridge!). Then, I whipped the mixture to see what happens. I thought it might make a lovely mousse. Well, it sort of did, but the texture was quite runny, and the mouthfeel was thin. Even worse, the cacao butter had formed into tiniest lumps — that definitely wasn’t appetizing! I had also planned to pour the mixture into an ice cream maker to see what kind of ice cream it would make, but because of those tiny lumps that formed after cooling down the liquid, it didn’t make any sense.

However, I was super-happy with my Keto White Hot Chocolate that now had enough taste. It was really rich and flavorful — and without any sugar or other nasty ingredients! I hope I convinced you to try it as well.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

 


 

Nutrition Information	In total	Per serving if 2 servings in total	Per serving if 4 servings in total
Protein	3.6 g	1.8 g	0.9 g
Fat	87.1 g	43.6 g	21.8 g
Net carbs	3.8 g	1.9 g	0.9 g
kcal	811 kcal	405 kcal	203 kcal

 

Tips for variation

For a dairy-free and completely vegan version, use coconut cream instead of heavy cream. If you like the flavor of coconut, nothing prevents you from using only coconut cream or thick coconut milk as liquid to prepare this Keto White Hot Chocolate.

For an exciting twist, add grated nutmeg on top just before serving. You can get a brisk twist by adding a drop or two food-grade citrus essential oil, like orange, lemon, or lime. Add it to the hot mixture, just before blending.

Want to have your daily dose of caffeine, too? Then add 1-2 sachets of instant coffee to the hot mixture before blending.

If you like licorice (like we Finns do!), you can add 1/2-1 teaspoon raw licorice powder at the same time with the other ingredients. Salmiakki (salty licorice) powder is also something exciting if you happen to get some. (I seriously think these variations are only for Finns or at least for Nordic people as licorice and salmiakki are not that common all over the world. Moreover, they really are very much an acquired taste.)

In case you want to take this drink to the direction of a traditional chocolaty hot chocolate, add 1-2 tablespoons dark cocoa powder together with the other ingredients.

General prattling

Like I said, I took the progress photos for this post already last week in the summer house of our CEO’s wife. The lighting conditions were very challenging, as you can see from this photo that is straight out of the camera:

…compared to this edited version:

It’s pretty remarkable what you can do with a proper photo editing program! I use Lightroom, by the way.

This week was hectic because of several meetings, plus I also had to hurry with the language technology-related assignment I have been doing for the Maltese language. Talking of which, here I’m explaining to our marketing guy, Vellu, what I actually do for different languages — like create the phoneme inventory, program the letter-to-sound rules (and a script to check them) with Perl, create the part-of-speech scheme, develop huge word lists with pronunciations (that I’ve created with my rules). Then I also have to write various documentations to explain everything that I’ve done plus also tell about the peculiarities of the language in question. And this I’ve done now for dozens of languages. Vellu made me realize that not many people in this world can do things like that!

My order from a Greek online food store arrived (thank you, Stavros, for the great tip!). As you cannot get top-quality olives in Finland (though we do have other superb stuff, like wild berries that are genuine superfood), I ordered a considerable amount of different varieties of organic olives. There are some walnuts, too:

These black olives with thyme are super-tasty. They are slightly dried, and they are full of a characteristic flavor that I totally love:

The launch of my Finnish book about the keto-vegan lifestyle (Kasvisruokien ketokäsikirja), is happening soon. We were creating a marketing plan with the publisher company this week. I was totally surprised that the largest hypermarket chain in Finland also took it to their selection! The official launch is at the beginning of February, just before my presentation in the Minä Olen fair in Finlandia House. There is also going to be an official launch party later in the spring.

Meanwhile, the Finnish magazine “Ketoosi” just came out today. It’s the first-ever purely Finnish magazine that is dedicated to a keto diet. To be honest, there appeared already a couple of weeks ago one keto diet-related magazine as well, but it’s just basically translated into Finnish from Swedish. But in this brand new “Ketoosi” magazine, there are the most knowledgeable keto gurus in Finland telling their best tips and recipes, so it’s very high-quality stuff!

There’s my article where I tell my story how I found the keto lifestyle already over ten years ago. I also have some recipes there — naturally with 5 ingredients or less. Actually, I wrote the article last December in Athens. I have to say I was really productive in Athens: during one week, I managed to write several thousands of words for my book and two magazine articles.

Here’s a better look of the magazine itself, my article and some of my recipes: