Loke Camp Warm-Up Cocoa
A hot drink for the hour when the stove is already running and nobody wants to get out of the chair.
- calories
- 320
- weight
- 2.2 oz
- cal / oz
- 145
- protein
- 6 g
- serves
- 1, scales
- prep
- 2 min
- cook
- 5 min
- total time
- 7 min
- water
- 350 ml boiled
- cost
- $
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Drink
- Canister stove
- Liquid fuel
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Winter / snow
- Vegetarian
- Nut free
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Shelf stable
- Dump and stir
Ingredients
| Unsweetened cocoa powder | 2 tbsp | |
|---|---|---|
| Powdered whole milk | 1/4 cup | whole, not skim, or it tastes thin |
| Sugar | 2 tbsp | |
| Instant coffee | 1/2 tsp | not enough to taste like coffee, enough to deepen the cocoa |
| Cinnamon | 1/4 tsp | |
| Salt | a pinch | |
| Coconut oil or butter powder | 1 tsp | optional, adds body and calories |
Method
- Bring 350 ml of water to a boil, then pull the pot off the flame.
- Add a splash of the hot water to the dry mix in your mug and stir it to a paste first. Dumping powder into a full mug gives you lumps.
- Pour in the rest of the water and stir until the powder is gone.
- Let it sit a minute. It comes out of the pot hotter than you want to drink.
The source page here was a gas heater, not a recipe, so this is the drink that goes with sitting next to one. Cold-weather camp cocoa fails in two predictable ways: it comes out watery, or it comes out lumpy. The fix for the first is whole milk powder and a fat, which give the drink body that cocoa and sugar alone cannot. The fix for the second is making a paste before you add the full volume of water.
The instant coffee and the salt are doing quiet work. Neither is detectable on its own, but cocoa without them reads flat and one-note, especially when the mix has been sitting in a pack for a week. Mix everything dry at home so camp is one bag and one pour.
Packing
One bag per mug, mixed at home. The cocoa and milk powder cake up in humidity, so squeeze the air out and keep the bags off the tent floor.
Variations
- A spoonful of powdered peanut butter turns it into a dessert, but it is no longer nut-free.
- Swap the milk powder for coconut milk powder to make it dairy-free.
- Cayenne instead of cinnamon if you want the heat to last past the first sip.
https://casambu.com/products/chauffage-a-gaz-infrarouge-loke-heater-primus