Occasionally I feel like I need a hot, sweet treat. Something to warm me up and provide old-fashioned comfort. Something more substantial than a cup of coffee or tea. Sometimes I need a cup of hot cocoa. But since I try not to eat a lot of sugar, my choices are limited. Luckily, Swiss Miss makes a sugar free hot cocoa mix.

This is a powder to which you add hot water. The powder comes in a little envelope with a tear strip across the top. You can buy boxes with 8 envelopes, or 24. The powder is a light brown color, very soft, and smells great. The smell always takes me right back to the winters of my childhood. If you're not careful when pouring it into your cup, some of it tends to fly up in a "dust cloud", so pour slowly.

Add 6 oz. (3/4 cup) of hot water. The directions are very clear that you should use hot water, not boiling. I'm not sure why they make this distinction, but they say it three separate times in the directions, so I guess they're serious about it! I tried it both ways just to see if I could figure out why they make such a big deal out of this. Other than one cup being hotter than the other, they looked and tasted the same to me. So, don't ask me why, but they want you to use hot, not boiling, water.

After adding the water and stirring, the top of the cocoa is bubbly, almost as if it were frothed. But once you drink off the top, the rest of the drink is not bubbly at all. I like the bubbly part, and wish it had that consistency throughout, but it doesn't.

So how does it taste? Well, this is definitely not the hot cocoa of my childhood. I would say that it tastes "OK" but not great. Sometimes I add a little bit of artificial sweetener to the mixture, to make it a bit sweeter. Other times I'll add some cold milk to make it a bit creamier. As sugar-free goes, it's not the worst tasking product I've tried, but it's not the best, either. It's something I will have a few times a year on those really cold days where nothing else will do. But then I remember that it's really not as tasty as I would like.

This product is sweetened with Splenda brand sucralose. Each cup contains 60 calories, 1g of fat, 170mg of sodium, and 1g of fiber. (Their regular product contains 120 calories and 2.5g of fat)

As far as a recommendation goes, my advice is this: If you have to (or simply choose to) keep away from sugar, but yearn for a cup of hot cocoa, give this product a try. But don't expect that same rich, creamy flavor that regular cocoa provides. It's just not the same.







Happy to support Lean-n-mean VI and Tom & Julie's Food for Food Writeoff
Why not join us?


Recommended: Yes