A black cherry cocoa with Miss Marple

This is how I imagine a perfect autumn evening. Ideally, I’d like to have a hot cocoa date with the real Miss Marple. Or rather, Jane Marple as she is portrayed by Margaret Rutherford in the four 1960s films directed by George Pollock that our wonderful Disney Sea adventuring and emergency washing machine providing pal Sb introduced the duck and me to last year. Sb told us that she had just discovered the series herself a few months prior and that upon watching the 1961 Murder She Said, she knew she had to share this cinematic experience with the duck and me because we would immensely enjoy it (same as Sb, we had known of Miss Marple beforehand, but had never actually seen any of the films). Sb was right!Here is the duck posing next to the cocoa concoction – or cocoction? – we made to accompany today’s friend recommendation: a black forest gateau hot cocoa inspired by the one they served at Epcot several Christmases ago, but with cherry syrup (can’t let the main ingredient in Phryne Fisher’s Cherry-flavored Mystery go to waste) instead of cherry liqueur, and our very own copy of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films that, of course, we had to invest in so that we could have hot cocoa dates with our quick-witted British lady detective pal anytime. If you’ve never seen these films and/or wonder how we made this cherry hot cocoa in need of improvement, do read on:

Hunt for the hot wildercocoa

The duck and I have tried to make a delicious cup of hot cocoa countless times. So far, we would only get guaranteed success by using a hot cocoa mix that you simply need to add hot water or milk to. Those cups of hot cocoa tend to taste a bit too sweet and make us feel like complete failures. Whenever we have tried to create our own hot cocoa mix by using baking cocoa and other simple ingredients, the result was never satisfactory. Until recently, that is, when we made our first cup of hot cocoa that didn’t taste like sadness and regret!Also recently we watched one of our favorite movies again: Hunt for the Wilderpeople, written and directed by Taika Waititi, one of our preferred directors and vampire impersonators. Since this movie was recommended to us by and first watched with two of our favorite people, J and Al, back when we saw them (too) many years ago – when traveling was only a matter of funds and free time – the duck and I thought that this would be the perfect friend recommendation to accompany our photographic journey to a somewhat decent cup of homemade hot cocoa: