For New Year’s Eve this year, Dave and I served a multi-course meal, full of complex and labor-intensive dishes. What had our guests raving and demanding seconds and thirds, though? These simple little flans, which I threw together on a whim the day before.
This basic flan recipe has only 5 ingredients, and takes just […]

On a cold winter night, with icy slush waiting just outside the door, the greatest comfort I can imagine involves warm chestnuts, chocolate, and dried strawberries, far more flavorful than the imported ones you can buy this time of year. And last night, as we hid indoors from the “wintry mix” outside (it sounds like […]

This is autumn in its purest form, by which I probably mean its most candy-like form. Forget maple sugar drizzled on snow and all those other mental images we all picked up from Little House on the Prairie - this brittle is the real deal.
Offering to friends and officemates has been a blast, because people […]

The worst thing about my latest cookbook acquisition, Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, is the terrible difficulty I had in trying to decide what to make first. In the end, though, I had to go with these cookies.
This turned out to be […]

It was hard, trying to figure out what to do for Sugar High Friday #25: Truffles. After all, we all know how to make truffles - either you throw together a ganache and roll it in something, then keep it in the fridge, or you take out your chocolate molds and create chocolate shells into […]

These candies are what Snickers bars ought to be - soft, salty caramel with the luscious crunch of cocoa nibs, topped with almond butter nougat, and coated with dark, high-quality chocolate.
If I’m feeling very nice indeed, I will make boxes of these to give away for the holidays.
Buying candy at the store is always such […]

I met John Scharffenberger last Thursday.
Yes, one of the founders of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker.
I passed by my local chocolate cafe, The Chocolate Room, that afternoon, only to notice a sign in the window saying that John Scharffenberger would be there that evening to give a talk and sign copies of his new book, Essence […]

The Queen of Sheba was Solomon’s only match, as rich and wise as he, or more. Legend has it that it was she who told him of the lost vessel of blessed light that cast peace on anyone who stood in its presence, which became the greatest of his treasures. William Butler Yeats imagined the […]

My mother’s side of the family is Hungarian. Her parents were born in a small town in Hungary, and their paths took them from there to Auschwitz, from Auschwitz back to Hungary (with a few countries in between), from Hungary to Italy (briefly), from Italy to Israel (where they helped found a moshav), and finally […]

Cocoa nibs are nothing more than pieces of roasted cocoa beans, the basic building blocks of chocolate. They’re slightly bitter, with an intense flavor that can vary greatly depending on their origin. While you can taste a hint of the chocolate they can become, they really have a unique and incomparable flavor of their own.
I […]