Make Your Hot Chocolate Taste Like Gingerbread With 4 Extra Spices

While you can sip on a warm cup of hot chocolate at any time of the year, perhaps the best time to indulge in a cup is during the winter months. It's in good company with other seasonal favorites, namely candy canes, Christmas cookies, and the like. One not-so-unlikely pairing that is an absolute treat during the coldest months of the year is gingerbread and hot chocolate. While it's delicious to dip a gingerbread cookie into a cup of warm hot chocolate, there's an even better way to combine the two of them in a sippable format. 

Gingerbread hot chocolate is the beverage upgrade you didn't know that you needed. To make this beverage at home, you're going to want to start with a basic hot chocolate. Then, build upon the beverage by adding a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, dried ginger, and nutmeg. Besides this basic spice blend, though, you'll need to really drive home that gingerbread component by adding some molasses to your beverage. Molasses will drive home that slightly sulfuric, yet rich flavor that makes classic gingerbread cookies so delicious. Just make sure not to be too heavy-handed with the sticky molasses, as adding too much of it to your cup can make the beverage bitter. 

A quality spice mix and molasses is a great way to get your gingerbread hot chocolate off on the right foot, but that's not saying that it's the only way to make your cup more festive. For one, you may also want to consider adding a gingerbread cookie piece to the top of your beverage — you can make it look like the gingerbread character is floating in a sauna of whipped cream. That way, you can dip your cookie into the hot chocolate as you sip. After all, milk and cookies is a little boring.

You could also make a gingerbread whipped cream by adding your spices to the whipped cream base. There are many ways to make homemade whipped cream; just find a method that works well for you, pack on the homemade spice, and you'll have a topping that you can use for nearly any seasonal baked goods. Moreover, you could also do some searching to find a bag of gingerbread-flavored marshmallows to finish off the perfect warming cup of hot cocoa.