The Greater Vancouver Hot Chocolate Festival returns for its 13th year in support of three local charity organizations. The Hot Chocolate Festival features the greater Vancouver region’s best chocolatiers, pastry shops, bakeries, cafes and ice cream makers.

Follow us on our stops on the hot chocolate festival!

Honolulu Coffee (Kerrisdale)

This was our favourite stop. The pair named the Donut has all my favorite flavors. The donut has raspberry icing, and the hot chocolate is 70% dark chocolate with a single shot of espresso, with sea salt cream cheese frosting.

We came back on the second week and had the Raincouver! It was my favourite one of the festival. It had a cotton candy cloud, which sprinkled silver stars into your hot chocolate as you ate it. Very creative!

Faubourg (Kerrisdale)

Faubourg is usually my favourite place to stop by for a fancy treat. But we didn’t have the greatest experience with this order. While the photo looks very aesthetic, the pastries tasted like they were probably a day old (dry and somewhat stale). And we found the chocolate explosion fun to see the chocolate bomb go in, but it lacked any sort of unique or distinct flavour profile. Same went with the French Caesar — it tasted mostly like milk. For $30 for both drinks, it was a huge disappointment. And the cafe was too busy and somewhat understaffed to even make waiting in line and complaining worth it. We ended up at Tim Hortons across the street to get a decent cup of hot chocolate.

Caffe Artigiano (Kerrisdale)

We tried the Cookies and Creme at Caffe Artigiano. It is a blend of dark and white chocolate sauce, house made syrup, fresh whipped cream and dark chocolate cookie crumble. It was served with a chocolate cookie with white and dark chocolate chips. The blend of the bitter dark hot chocolate and white chocolate was a pleasant and mellow hot chocolate