Carnation Chocolate Malted Milk, 1950s,
photo by Roadsidepictures.

In the right menu of this page, you can see a list of some of the recipe ideas Kristen and I have been thinking about trying. On the top of the list is one that sounds wonderful: Malted Milk Cake. I am a huge fan of malt flavor, particularly chocolate malted milk, and I have a recipe all lined up for it.

But there’s a catch. I can’t find the chocolate malted milk anywhere in Seattle so far. I used to buy it occasionally at various local grocery stores, but now they only seem to carry the plain malt. Safeway and Albertson’s don’t even go that far. A search for “malted milk” on the Albertson’s website only brings up these.

The one grocery store that does have the product is Amazon Fresh. But they do not deliver to us. No one I know seems to use Amazon Fresh.

So alternatives must be found.

These are the alternatives I know of:

• Ovaltine chocolate malt drink powder: I think this is probably too sweet and has too many extra ingredients, though maybe it would work
• Milo chocolate malt drink powder: this should be available at Uwajimaya, I think, and might be similar, though I’ve never tried it
• Making a homemade version from the plain Carnation Malted Milk

Currently I’m leaning toward the latter. I think that malted milk, cocoa, and sugar might do the trick. Another malted milk cake recipe online seems to do it that way.

Edited to add:

I’ve just done a little experimenting. The following recipe gives me a relatively decent chocolate malted milk mixture, not overly sweet. A bit more sugar could be added, I suppose, but I get the idea that the stuff was perhaps less sweet back in the day anyway:

2 parts Carnation Malted Milk (plain)
1 part unsweetened cocoa
1 1/2 parts sugar