It takes certain qualities to fuel a viral food trend. There’s sheer novelty (cloud bread!), or maybe a gross-out factor. (Remember when people eating cereal from each other’s mouths was a thing for a minute?) And for many, sourdough baking was our pandemic kitchen therapy.

And then there are some that check allll the boxes. In that rarefied category of things that seem engineered to dominate our social media feeds, we’ll put hot cocoa bombs. When these filled chocolate spheres are submerged into steamy milk, they erupt in a delightful explosion of marshmallows swimming in hot chocolate. The confections, which started catching on last year via TikTok videos and snowballed in recent weeks, have creeped through our screens to become IRL holiday objects of desire, akin to that Baby Yoda doll you can’t find anywhere this year.

Of course you can try to make them at home (more on that later), but still, bakers are reporting selling out of cocoa bombs. Frantic mom groups on Facebook are fretting about procuring them for the holidays.

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