If ambrosia is the nectar of the gods, then chocolate is the main course. Specifically, dark chocolate in all its incarnations, from foil-wrapped bars to warming winter beverages. Or, as I made recently, chocolate crepes stuffed with mascarpone cheese and fresh mango slices. Talk about a delicious way to get your morning started! And it’s [...]
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Crepes are one of those things that sound hard to make. They’re not. In essence, they’re pancakes with extra milk, so if you can make a batch of flapjacks, you can make crepes. Admittedly, crepes are thinner and therefore more prone to breaking, but all you need to deal with that is a spatula to [...]
Continue reading about How About Chocolate, Crepes, and Strawberries for Breakfast?
Ever since I went to Spain last year, I’ve started to enjoy the occasional cup of coffee. Turns out the reason I didn’t like coffee before going to Spain was that I had only had bitter, instant-style American coffee. Freshly roasted and ground beans taste entirely different — mellow, almost sweet, and needing only a [...]
If I say, “Name a nut!” you probably won’t say “Chestnuts!” I don’t think of them much, either — when I think “nuts,” I think of walnuts and pecans and pistachios and macadamias and peanuts and pretty much every other kind of nut except chestnuts. I’d probably think of Brazil nuts before chestnuts. But lately [...]
Most people like brownies better than blondies — after all, brownies have a chocolate base and blondies don’t. But what about blondies spiked with two kinds of chocolate? Even better, what if the blondie batter is made with almond butter? (Or any nut butter, for that matter.) Then you’ve got a nutty blondie base that’s [...]
Chocolate figs come in lots of variations: fresh figs, dried figs, figs soaked in booze, unadorned figs. And there’s the chocolate component: dark, really dark, ultra-dark. (I guess you could use milk chocolate, but the bitterness of dark chocolate contrasts beautifully with the sweetness of figs. Also, dark chocolate sets better than milk chocolate does.) [...]
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As a chocolate purist, I’m a big fan of nibs, otherwise known as chopped-up cocoa beans. (Kind of like steel-cut oats are chopped-up whole oat groats.) Some nibs are toasted, some are raw; some are sweetened with a dusting of unrefined cane sugar, some are not. I tend to favor roasted over raw — as [...]
Since so many people are trying to cut down on sugar nowadays (great idea!), I’ve been playing with stevia lately. Not the “raw” white powder — which I’m not a fan of since it’s more than 50% dextrose/cheap corn sugar by weight — but stevia in its more natural forms, from fresh leaves to dried [...]
Ever thought of cheesecake as “refreshing”? Or “healthy”? If all you’ve had are typical cheesecakes, you’re probably saying “No!” That’s because typical cheesecakes are made with commercial cream cheeses that taste oily and flat. (Along with containing plenty of stabilizers and thickeners.) Typical cheesecakes are also made with heaping amounts of refined sugar in both the [...]
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