Make Your Own Chocolate Syrup

Chocolate lovers, rejoice! Recipes for homemade chocolate syrup are so easy and delicious, you won’t believe you haven’t made it before. Skip the brown squeeze bottle full of preservatives and artificial flavors; it tastes better when you make your own chocolate syrup to drizzle over ice cream and use to make chocolate milk.

Before we get started, let’s address a few common chocolatey concerns:

• You won’t need to melt any chocolate. (No chocolate-melting required at all. I promise!)
• There is no special equipment involved. Do you have a saucepan and something to stir with? Then you’re set.
• Wondering why you would want to make your own chocolate syrup? There are so many answers: It’s delicious, you’re in control of the ingredients, it’s less expensive, and sometimes it’s easier to make your own than make yet another supermarket run. (There’s also the matter of having a chocolate craving hit when it’s 9:30 p.m. and you’re already in your jammies).
• Chocolate Syrup

• The ingredients for chocolate syrup are probably already in your cabinets:

Sugar (2 cups)
Cocoa powder (1/2 cup)
Salt (pinch)
Water (1 cup)
Vanilla Extract (1 teaspoon)

Cooking directions:

• Combine all ingredients except the vanilla extract in a saucepan. If you are out of vanilla extract, you can make your own by following these instructions.
• Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it boils. Stirring is important.
• Allow it to boil for a few minutes – but don’t walk away from it. Stir it frequently so that it doesn’t boil over and make a mess. (You can turn the heat down slightly, as long as it continues to simmer.)
• Add the vanilla extract just after you remove it from the heat.

That’s it! You now have chocolate syrup. It will be thin when it’s hot like this, just out of the pan, but will thicken as it cools. Definitely let it cool quite a bit before placing into a plastic squeeze bottle. Later, when you pull it out of the fridge, you’ll see it’s just as thick as the store kind.

You can adjust the amount of chocolate and sugar to make it taste the way you want, but those amounts will give you a sweet, syrupy chocolate like the kind that comes in a brown plastic squeeze bottle from the grocery store. Just note that homemade syrup does not last as long as the store-bought kind.

This homemade chocolate syrup would also be a nice addition to a basket of homemade gifts. You can find a nice glass bottle with a stopper or go with clear plastic condiment bottles from discount stores.