3 Ingredient - make your own instant hot cocoa mix

I've been thinking a lot this week about how to improve my next camping trip with my girls. One of the things that struck me while out food shopping was how many hot cocoa mixes list their first or second ingredient as corn syrup. Throw in the fact that most of them also insist you use milk and not water, so many of these instant hot cocoa options are not desirable. 

So I got to thinking, how could I do better for next time.  

So, I started to think about what would need to go into hot cocoa for something closer to homemade, but also easy to make ahead and mix once we were on the go.  

Walking down the baking isle at my local supermarket I spotted the nonfat instant dried milk. My initial reaction to dried nonfat milk is usually a mild disgust. However as we would need to add cocoa and some sugar, I started to think with all that flavor that this might not be too bad.  

Doing a little digging around for hot cocoa from scratch recipes, I came up with the following.  

• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 packet of nonfat dried milk (enough to mix a quart) 
• Optionally some cinnamon or vanilla powder might also be nice

Mix the powder together in a bowl and pour it into a zippered storage bag. 

Through a bit of taste testing I found roughly 4 tablespoons of mix to 1 cup of hot water made a delicious cuppa cocoa.  No weird stabilizers and no corn syrup.