Get the recipe here.
If you want to see a grown person's eyes widen as they audibly gasp, hitting a higher pitch than if they'd won the Powerball or witnessed a piglet wearing tiny rain boots, make a dish pastel-rainbow-colored and cover it in sprinkles, preferably star-shaped, and call it "unicorn." The internet's long been obsessed with the mythical creature (Whaddup, Charlie the Unicorn?), but over the past year, the trend's hit food in a huge way, extending from blogger recipes to hitting restaurant menus.
The latest in this lineup, which extends from chocolate bark to cheesecake, is unicorn hot chocolate. The dessert made headlines across the world in a matter of days, spanning websites like The Huffington Post, Fox, Cosmo and, of course, Delish. The drink was being Instagrammed like crazy at Crème and Sugar, a café in Anaheim, CA, that's so on board with the unicorn trend it developed an entire secret menu devoted to the treats, offering milkshakes, chocolate bark and cake as well.
Similar drinks are sold at The Vintage Cupcake Kitchen (theirs comes topped with a whole cupcake!) and Skarlett's Café, both in the United Kingdom, but if you don't live within road-tripping distance of these shops, it seemed you were destined to live vicariously through the lucky few. Until now.
We set out to recreate the drink, which has a white hot chocolate base, putting our own spin on it. Instead of pink hot cocoa, we liked a more psychedelic purple. In place of regular whipped cream, decided to go full throwback-to-Lisa-Frank-slash-acid-dream, creating a rainbow whip you could swirl on top, and topping the thing with Lucky Charms and sprinkles, because mini rainbow-, shooting star- and horseshoe-shaped marshmallows seems like a must for creating the most magical drink in all the land.
This drink may seem like a lot of work for what's essentially food coloring-dyed white hot chocolate, but the sheer glee it brings people is worth it. Not convinced? Create your own DIY unicorn hot chocolate bar, with bowls of sprinkles, multicolored mini marshmallows, Lucky Charms, and all different colors of whipped cream, and watch people of all ages lose it. Serve it with a slice of our unicorn cheesecake and stream The Last Unicorn, and you've got the perfect way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.
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