Substitute Powdered Sugar With This Drink Mix For Richer Flavor In Chocolate Desserts

Powdered sugar is the key ingredient in icings, glazes, and final touches for numerous baked goods, from pastries to cookies, to cakes. Its ultra-fine consistency melts in your mouth if it doesn't melt into a glaze first, providing an intense sweetness that pairs well with the underlying bitterness in chocolate. However, if you don't have powdered sugar, hot chocolate mix is the ideal substitute to bring an even richer chocolate flavor to desserts.

Powdered sugar is granulated sugar ground into its namesake form, so as an ingredient, it's fairly one-dimensional. While powdered sugar is a versatile sweetener that'll pair with a number of dessert flavors, hot cocoa mix has a diverse depth that'll both sweeten chocolate desserts and make them even more chocolatey. Most commercial hot cocoa mixes contain sugar, cocoa powder, and milk powder or creamer, so you get a milky, creamy, sweet complement to the chocolate dessert along with added chocolate to enhance the notes of cacao.

Hot cocoa mix makes an easy one-to-one substitute, so you can use the same amount of hot cocoa mix to swap for powdered sugar, whether you're dusting double chocolate chunk cookies and brownies or making a rich chocolate icing for black forest cake.

Hot cocoa mix has a powdered-sugar consistency but it's usually a bit more coarse than powdered sugar. So, you could run it through a coffee grinder or food processor if you want to more accurately imitate powdered sugar's consistency. You can take a tip from chocolate cake recipes when making vanilla buttercream frosting with the hot cocoa mix swap, adding a pinch of instant espresso powder for a nice bitter complement. Hot cocoa mix would also work really well beaten into cream cheese for chocolate cream cheese icing to spread over gooey brownies or chocolate cookies. You could also use chocolatey cream cheese as its own dessert dip or to flavor a standard cheesecake recipe.

Since hot cocoa mix usually requires nothing more than water to create a decadent and creamy hot chocolate, you could simply add a much smaller portion of water to create an equally creamy, dairy-rich glaze for a moist chocolate pound cake or banana loaf. Of course, you can also use hot cocoa mix in dessert batters in addition to granulated sugar to create a milk-chocolate flavor profile. Hot cocoa brownies with dark chocolate chunks would provide a well-balanced intensity of chocolate. You can also add hot cocoa mix to a chocolate milkshake or to sweeten the whipped cream that comes on top of it.