Witch's Brew - Halloween Hot Chocolate

   I'm not really one for Halloween - I think I mentioned this before. I don't go anywhere so I rarely dress up, just for poops and giggles at home really. We don't get any trick or treaters either so Halloween doesn't really hold much significance for us at all. The only thing really is that I see it as an excuse to watch a movie and eat sweets and maybe make a few slightly unusual crafts, but those are few and far between.

   This year I've been trying to find ways to stay healthy through Halloween without feeling like I'm missing out, because whether I go to any parties or dress up or not, there are still lots of Halloween sweets in the shops - just coloured variations of existing products like mini rolls and the like, and cheap, rubbish chocolate in Halloween foils, but it still makes me want to buy them regardless.

   Well, this year I didn't except for one bag of predictably disappointing chocolate eyeballs.

   But I mentioned I was trying to stay healthy. Well, that can mean many things, from trying to swap out bad foods for good, eating lower-calorie options or just straight up holding back when my inner child wants to scoff the lot - to be fair, I should be holding back anyway.

   Well, I recently posted a few Halloween options of good and healthy food - superfood marzipan monsters and a sludgy spooky spirulina smoothie - but there's only so far you can go and I refuse to miss out on my old favourites. So I made hot chocolate. Green hot chocolate. 50 calorie green hot chocolate with no artificial colours.

   "How?!" I hear you cry, "how?!"

   Well it's dead simple. I always use Options hot chocolates because they come in sachets which helps portion control - ie, it stops me from adding extra spoons - and because it's low in calories, you add water, not milk, and it contains ingredients like coconut oil and sugar is quite low on the list of ingredients. And as Options also have a range of...well, options, they also have white chocolate.

   How about the green? Well, it's tea. Yup, green tea. And no, it doesn't taste funny because the chocolate itself actually smothers the taste of the tea. But as well as getting a natural shade of green, by combining the two you get all the goodness and antioxidants of green tea, too!

You Will Need:
Options white hot chocolate (tub or sachet; sachets are more controlled portions)
Green tea bags, loose green tea or matcha powder

   The green tea bag I have in my house at this point all produce a yellowish green tea, and the loose teas, while they produce a beautiful clear green, I wanted something with more body in its colour, so I opted for matcha. It's true that I have a taste for it and many people don't like it, but at the same time the hot chocolate actually over-writes the taste - and if you're still not partial to it, you could always add 2 or 3 squares of white chocolate once it's all combined to give it more creaminess and give the white chocolate more strength.

   If you're using a tea bag or loose tea, know from the start that the colour will thin once the hot chocolate is added, so choose something with a good colour.

   Brew the tea bag/leaves in a cup as you usually would. Once your tea has reached a desirable strength and colour, add your hot chocolate powder and mix it all together.

   If you're using matcha powder, mix up a shot (1 teaspoon of powder and about 50ml water) and set it aside. In another cup, mix the hot chocolate powder with about half a mug of water, then add a little of the matcha at a time and stir. I added it gradually and mixed it, but ended up adding the whole matcha shot to the chocolate to get the colour I wanted.

   As I said, the hot chocolate overpowers even the matcha, but adding a couple of squares of white chocolate to melt in the mixture will boost the white chocolate flavour as well as thicken it all up, and adding one square at a time also helps in terms of calorie-control as most bars these days will list calories per piece of big bars, or you can just do the math with a smaller bar.