I’d like to welcome you to my personal Odyssey, a journey on which I hope to never again embark.
Hot chocolate bombs are all the rage this year (in fact, a friend of mine referred to them as the Tickle Me Elmo of 2020). I’m not sure where it started, but I blame Pinterest and Instagram “influencers” who needed something weird to take pictures of the the holidays. I make fun of that stuff… and I’m also a sucker for it. The same way I work in marketing and am attracted to end cap displays in Target like a moth to a flame. I know a winner when I see it.
It goes without saying, then, that I decided to torture myself with making 20+ (yikes) of these for Christmas gifts.
My process was a bit trial and error because I couldn’t find just one tutorial that worked the way I wanted it to. My final product ended up being a mashup of several blogs and still isn’t perfect, but I’m not entirely mad with the results.
If you’re interested in trying these for yourself, here are my tips:
The double boiler is your friend. All these recipes are like, “Oh, just use a microwave. It’s fine.” No. It’s easy to burn and hardens too quickly, especially when making bombs in bulk. Invest in a double boiler and get happy. Mine is from Pampered Chef, back in the days when I didn’t know MLMs were evil, but I’m sure other good quality ones exist. I use it way more than I thought I would and your chocolate WILL NOT BURN as long as the water underneath doesn’t boil off. Seriously. INVEST.
Use literally any other color than brown for your molds. The only molds that Amazon had left were brown, which posed problems I’m sure you can easily imagine. I had to add more chocolate to plug a few holes more than once.
Always put them in the fridge to cool for at least 30 minutes. It makes popping them out of the silicone super easy.
When making your bomb, use cupcake wrappers to hold them so the chocolate doesn’t melt in your hands, causing ugly chocolate fingerprints. Keep them in a festive wrapper to prevent them from rolling around, too (form and function, people!)
Placing the edges on the a hot plate to melt the chocolate works really well, but don’t go too hog wild with it or else your bombs will be more oval than round.
White chocolate is the actual worst, so just don’t
You can fit more hot chocolate mix in these than you think
Of course, everyone knows the best part of a gift is the presentation, and I’m the type of person to stress myself about wrapping until I cry and throw my back out. Originally, we were going to display these in cute little boxes I bought off Amazon, but we’d also bought mugs to hand out and I had an entire roll of cellophane left over from gift baskets I’d made, so it just sort of happened that I wrapped each bomb individually and handed them out in a coordinating mug. Tie it off with a Tiffany bow and call it a day - I actually had to tell people I’d made them, which is the biggest compliment.
It also helps that I found cute sprinkles from Simply Sucre on Etsy to make them look more Christmasy. You really need to check out what’s offered there just because - you’ll never go back to store-bought sprinkles again. In fact, these sprinkles make commercial brands look downright ugly. They’re cost-effective for being unique and you can choose how much you want to buy, which I thought was great because they won’t sit in my cabinet forgotten about until next holiday season, at which point they’d get thrown in the trash. I’m really trying to cut down on buying too much of things I don’t need (note: this does not apply to Mill Hill holiday-themed cross stitch kits, so don’t @ me when I share everything I bought over the holidays)
Let me know if you’ve tried to make these and if you had any success. Overall, I found them easy to make, although the decorating didn’t really go well because - and I repeat - white chocolate is not worth it, and I didn’t have the immediate success of “gluing” them together like Pinterest promised (I put chocolate in a pastry bag and piped around the edges and added the sprinkles to ensure they stayed together in transit). Still, I’m happy with them and think they’re a fun holiday treat to make for friends and family.