chocolate - drinking chocolate with spices

Dark chocolate powder (73%, Venezuela) with lots of fragrant spices, packaged so pretty you’ll wish you didn’t open it!

Hard to find outside Europe, these artfully made and beautifully packaged drinking chocolates are made by a husband-and-wife team in Budapest. Rózsavölgyi Csokoládé, which means “valley of the roses” in Hungarian, was founded by graphic designer Katalin Csiszár and mechanical engineer Zsolt Szabad in 2004.

 They source single-origin cacao beans (from farms in Madagascar, Venezuela and Peru) for rich European-style drinking chocolate mixes. Each mix is made up of ground bean-to-bear dark chocolate, warm spices, organic cane sugar and organic cocoa butter—this is league’s apart from the bland powder you’d find at supermarkets. This is not American hot chocolate: Simply stir into hot milk (or water) and sip the bitterwseet, silky, almost pudding-like drink in an espresso cup.