My honorary aunt and dear friend recently gave me a copy of Enlightened Chocolate by Camilla V. Saulsbury. It’s a collection of ‘healthy’(-ish) chocolate recipes. My concept of healthy-ish cooking is to bake infrequently and give away most of my cookies, not fret over ingredients, but some of the recipes here actually look pretty tasty. […]

These truffles were inspired by Goat Lady Dairy, which I encountered at the farmers market in Greensboro, North Carolina last winter. Her chevre truffles were a blended ganache, about 60% chocolate to 40% chevre, with a bit of vanilla and salt as well – and they were fantastic! Of course, I had to come back […]

While I’m playing catch-up and trying to get back into the habit of blogging, here’s another set of truffles I made over the summer. I have a great love of the tingliness of Sichuan peppercorns in sweets as well as in savory dishes, and the flavor of them always makes me think of libraries and […]

You can make the honey truffles with any honey you like, but I used Zambian honey from Zambezi. I met the woman who imports it at the Fancy Food Show this year, and loved her story. She was in Zambia with the Peace Corps and loved the honey there, and started up the import business […]

This cake is light and luscious, like a barely cooked chocolate mousse. It’s best served with strawberries, which are coming in gorgeous from New Jersey to the Greenmarkets right about now. Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting Pille of nami-nami while she was visiting New York. She brought us some wonderful gifts, including […]

First things first. I would really appreciate it if you would go vote for me in Culinate’s Death By Chocolate contest. Also, I heard today is crepe day, so we made a Hungarian crepe cake! My grandmother says that she used to make this with a different filling in each layer – jam, ground walnuts, […]

I’d been craving chocolate chip cookies for weeks before I made these. But I was always too busy, or occasionally, trying to take a day now and then without eating any desserts. (This is difficult for me. I don’t tend to eat huge quantities of dessert, but I like a little bit of sweetness at […]

Not everything has to be complicated. These napoleons are dead simple and utterly delicious. The chocolate layers are made of an easy-schmeasy faux chocolate mousse, made by melting chocolate into heavy cream, chilling it, and whipping it like whipped cream. Phyllo is purchased, layered, and baked with minimal effort. And raspberries, oh, luscious, seasonal raspberries! […]

I love malt. A good vanilla malted is one of my favorite things in the world, and I adore those Banana Malt Brûlée Spoonfuls I made last summer. So for this recipe from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, I was up for questing all over to find a big carton of […]

This is a combination of two recipes from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, one of the smartest and friendliest cookbook authors and food bloggers I know. It remained moist and delicious almost a week later, and got rave reviews from my mother and Dave’s coworkers. (We bake a lot, so we […]

Having a food blog makes you instantly popular. People email you recipes. Your mother may cut out recipes from magazines and ask you to make them for her, in fact. Even kids like you better once you start to blog about food. My friend’s young nephew was eager to tell me of a recipe he […]

Dave wanted something chocolate and something creamy. I wanted to play more with Aki and Alex’s bee pollen spice mix, and thought saffron would pull everything together. I hesitate to call these brownies. They were based on a brownie recipe, but adjusted and baked in muffin tins so that they were practically transformed into rich […]

My partner, Dave, wanted to make brownies last night. “Fine,” I said. “Make them with urfa-biber!” Urfa-biber is our latest thrilling spice discovery. It’s a Turkish pepper, spicy and just extraordinarily flavorful. The literature all says that it tastes a bit like raisins, and I tend to agree. It has that depth of fruitiness to […]

I am constitutionally incapable of looking at a cookie recipe without feeling the urge to add, oh, cardamom and black pepper. Or something along those lines. It’s just one of those things. Some people can look at a chocolate almond swirl of a cookie recipe and think, God bless this green earth and the cookies […]

This recipe is ludicrously long, but given that it comes from Paula Wolfert’s The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook, that should come as no surprise. If you have a weekend to spend lounging about the house and letting things cook, though, these lamb shanks are absolutely luscious and worth the time. They […]

When is a bread not a bread? When it’s a monkey! Life has been pretty stressful for me lately, with some hard decisions still left for me to make, so my partner Dave and I decided to spend a recent evening just monkeying around. We dipped balls of risen, yeasted dough into melted monkey butter […]

I thought I could add balsamic vinegar to these fabulously easy cookies to make them even more interesting. I love balsamic vinegar with sweets as well as with savories, so how could it not work? In the end, I couldn’t taste the vinegar at all, but the cookies seemed more chocolatey than they ever had […]

This is Dave’s ancestral recipe for banana chocolate chunk muffins, slightly updated for the modern age. The key difference is that the modern age involves Chinatown produce stands with small, cute bananas, and cheap bars of Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate at the Co-op.

I was walking in to work the other day when I passed a large piece of gorgeous granite countertop leaning against the side of someone’s stoop. It had a sign taped to it that read, “Do Not Touch.” As I was staring longingly at it, a man came out of the building and told me […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is my entry The Spice is Right VII: Seasons of Love. If you would like to join in, please do! Today is the last day to post entries for this month’s challenge, which is all about family spice mixes. One of the flavor bases Dave and I have been using a lot since we […]

I have a confession to make: I like chocolate sorbet better than chocolate ice cream. There is a darling little chocolate cafe near my apartment called The Chocolate Room. Every time we go there, we are given a tiny dish of unbelievable Valhrona sorbet as a mise en bouche which always ends up surpassing whatever […]

One of the best things about NYC, and Park Slope in particular, is the abundance of streetbooks. Everywhere I go, I find books people have left out on the street for whomever may pass by. A few days after the move, we found an autographed copy of Bobby Flay Cooks American sitting in a box […]

Josh, the elder of my younger brothers, took a bite out of a store-bought chocolate the other day, and declared, “This is amazing! What is this delicious taste that is filling my mouth? I know it, I know that I know it, but I can’t think of what it is!” It was a maple cream. […]

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. […]

The lace pattern of these cookies is created by the bubbling of the very thin, caramel-based batter. When the cookies are removed from the oven, the bubbles collapse, creating the lace between them. When summer comes around, I intend to use the same technique to make honey lace cookies sandwiching homemade sour cherry jam. Lace […]

Dave and I spent an entire weekend trying to make this cake, and we utterly failed at life at least twice during that time. On our first attempt, we undercooked it, and then we tried to remove it from the pan before giving it a chance to fully cool. Unsurprisingly, it oozed all over the […]

I must confess: I’m off to a bad start. For my first post in this beautiful new blog that Lisa and Dave worked hard to create for me, I am showing off a recipe that I neither invented nor cooked alone. My partner, Dave, adapted Martha Stewart’s marshmallow recipe into something suitable to bring to […]