Cocoa v. Hot chocolate in recipes

[Binky]

I will be trying a chocolate ice cream soon. However, most of the recipes call for cocoa which I don't have. We do however have various hot chocolate powders ( Hotel Chocolat and Charbonnel et Walker).

Can I use these in place of cocoa?

[Suelle]

You'd need to check the ingredients of the hot chocolate powder you have - most contain milk and sugar as well as chocolate.

You could increase the amount of powder you use so that you're using the same amount of cocoa eg if your hot chocolate powder is only 50% cocoa you'd need to use twice as much. Then you would probably also need to reduce the sugar used in the recipe too, to compensate for what's in the hot chocolate mix.

You can't lose much by trying - I don't see why it wouldn't work, unless the hot chocolate contained things which might adversely affect freezing.

[scullion]

both of those hot chocolates are actually powdered/flaked chocolate rather than a sort of cocoa powder and sugar combination (c&w better than h.c. - i chop my own to go in the velvetiser).
they should be fine in ice cream - i suggest you cut down the sugar content of the recipe though - and use the combined sugar/cocoa weight of the recipe when using those hot chocolates.
ps. and maybe cut down on the fat content in the recipe.

[Ameew]

I’ve done this before and just slightly reduced the amount of sugar and it was fine