Coffee with mini marshmallows and shaved dark chocolate

When my daughters were much younger, we’d buy Swiss Miss in large boxes. Not just one but, sometimes, two or three in different varieties. One of the favorites (husband’s favorite, actually, rather than the kids’) was the one with mini marshmallows.

Personally, however, I never really got the hang of drinking chocolate with small white dots (I was a cocoa drinker as a child). If I have to have marshmallows, I’d rather have the real thing instead of dehydrated ones that look like they had been fired at with a miniaturizing gun.

We haven’t bought Swiss Miss in years (skim milk and coffee are the staples these days) and I had forgotten about the tiny marshmallows until a friend and fellow lawyer whose name is Joel Nuñez (yes, the co-writer of the 2006 horror and suspense film “White Lady”) shared a photo in Facebook of a chocolate drink topped with mini marshmallows and shaved chocolate. Did I mention that Joel’s a foodie? Well, he is. And we chat about food and drinks a lot. And food writing too. And I drooled over the chocolate drink photo and said I’d make something similar at home. And I did. Instead of chocolate though, this is coffee with mini marshmallows and shaved dark chocolate.

The mini marshmallows and shaved chocolate aren’t just for decoration. The trick here is to first prepare the coffee with just a little bit of sugar (and milk or cream, if you prefer), top it with marshmallows and chocolate then stir both the marshmallows and chocolate into the very hot beverage. The marshmallows melt, augmenting the sweetness of the little sugar in the coffee and making the liquid thicker and richer.

What the dark chocolate does is self-explanatory, I think. But if I have to spell it out, the chocolate turns the already divine marshmallow-enriched coffee into something heavenly.

In case you’re wondering if it has to be dark chocolate, well, I would think so, yes, because milk chocolate might result in a too-sweet beverage. Of course, you can always experiment and use just a little or even combine dark and milk chocolate. But, for me, dark chocolate works best.