Last year I helped a friend make these as wed­ding favours. I thought it’s the most bril­liant thing! And very cute-look­ing with the marsh­mal­low on top. So when Mike and I were think­ing about small gifts that we can make a lot of at once for our cowork­ers, we decid­ed to give this a try again.

We fol­lowed the recipe from Dessert Design Life. There are many hot cocoa on a stick recipes out there, but I chose this one because it’s got some pret­ty good tips about the ingre­di­ents and meth­ods that seem to be help­ful for peo­ple who don’t bake or make desserts much, like me.

It’s actu­al­ly REALLY easy to make. It does­n’t even involve turn­ing the stove on (we melt­ed the choco­late in the microwave, but one could use a dou­ble boiler).

We crushed up some can­dy cane in the Mag­ic Bul­let (sift­ed out the fine powder), and sprin­kled some in the bot­tom of the ice tray before pip­ing in the chocolate.

After the choco­late was melt­ed, we mixed in cocoa pow­der and icing sug­ar, and piped them into an ice tray with a cut-up zip-lock bag. We added a marsh­mal­low on top and put in a stick (bam­boo skew­ers from the dol­lar store).

Here they are, set­ting in the ice tray. (with our fes­tive table cloth in the back­ground :D)

We put them in the fridge for about half an hour, and voilà! We were wor­ried that they might be more dif­fi­cult to de-mold with the can­dy cane bits in the bot­tom, but they popped out like ice.

I brushed a very small amount water on top of the marsh­mal­lows and sprin­kled more can­dy cane bits on top.

Mike made the styl­ish tags :D And we just put them in clear sand­wich bags and tied them up with yarn :)

We made about 50 sticks in a day, and it was a lot of fun :D

After giv­ing them away last week we had just two sticks left over. Which means we can cel­e­brate the begin­ning of win­ter with a cup of hot cocoa togeth­er :D Hap­py win­ter solstice!