Homemade Kahlua

My dearest Laura is a fabulous partner in culinary crime. We have such fun adventures and our most recent one was crafting Kahlua and making the chocolate sauce the recipe requires.

So first the chocolate sauce

All you need is:

½ cup fair trade cocoa powder (I would recommend Divine, Trader Joe's also sells fair trade cocoa)
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
⅛ teaspoon salt (I might have skipped measuring, I mean it is such a tiny amount, why measure?? oh, because if you don't you might accidental pour more in, no that wouldn't happen, or did it?)
¼ teaspoon vanilla (of course Laura makes her own, and it is simple: just soak a vanilla bean in vodka. If you need instructions go here.)

Start with the cocoa and water in a sauce pan. Get that all stirred up and hot until the cocoa dissolves. Let it boil on medium for 3 minutes(ish). Add the salt and the vanilla and let it cool.
Put it in a glass jar and it can store for months in the fridge, but you are about to use some of it for the Kahlua so don't put it away.

The measurements are pretty flexible. Mine was a bit salty, but I love salty and sweet combos so I loved it.

(original recipe found here, it has been edited a bit by me in this post)

Now for the Kahlua making!!!

Grandpa Goode’s Kahlua (original recipe found here)
3 cups sugar
4 cups water
2 oz soluble coffee (we used Via)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 vanilla bean
1 tbsp chocolate syrup
1/5 gallon vodka

Boil the sugar and water. (You are basically making simple syrup.) Add the soluble coffee. We used Via, we also did not use as much as the recipe calls for. It was such a strong roast it come out more than great with only 3/4ish of what the recipe calls for. Stir this until dissolved and let cool.

Once cool add the vanilla extract and the chocolate syrup. You can add the vanilla bean at this point but we didn't.



Because we didn't have one large ontainer we poured the vodka directly into the containers we were going to use with vanilla bean in each bottle.



We than added the coffee syrup concoction that we had just created to the Vodka. Now this was a funny adventure, because it was a lot of guessing. I would say that making it in one container is a better idea, but I was just sold on using these pretty glasses I had sitting around.


Now you have to let it sit for 2 weeks! Shake it every day so that the coffee and sugar don't settle too much. I also shake it every time before I serve it.

It tastes AMAZING with just a bit of cream. It is really my fave.