Chocolate

This is my favorite fudge cake. It is light, but also buttery, chocolaty, soft, and moist. Its texture is strong enough to hold up to buttercream, which can drag a lesser cake down. This cake goes with each of the four icings presented in this chapter.

These chocolate chip cookies have nuts and cocoa nibs, which give them an earthy crunch. Be sure to chill the dough before you scoop it out so the cookies will keep their shape as they bake.

Banana leaves gracefully cover cocoa beans in their fermenting bins where the beans develop their extraordinary flavor. Roadside farm stands in chocolate’s growing regions offer a jumble of bananas, cinnamon sticks, plantains, cacao pods, walnuts, vanilla beans, and coconuts, all from trees of the tropics. For that extra earth-friendly touch, use muffin or cupcake liners made with unbleached, eco-friendly paper.

This moist cake combines the fruits, nuts, and spices from the New World that the Spanish conquistadores discovered in 1508. Chocolate was part of this Mesoamerican tableau. Brown sugar and ginger arrived much later, but this cake pays homage to the riches of the original jungles and river valleys.

Many recipes for this Latin American caramel sauce suggest using a can of sweetened condensed milk. But if you make dulce de leche from scratch, as this recipe specifies, you’ll get a delicate sweetness from cooked sugar and fresh milk no canned product can ever match. It is very easy but takes a long time—about 1 1/2 hours, even though all you have to do is give it an occasional stir. Here’s the trick: choose a time when you’ll be in the kitchen awhile—maybe a weekend afternoon or a night you are making another slow-cooked sauce. This version, untraditionally, is flavored with milk chocolate. Serve over ice cream or pound cake.

Authentic, fiery mole sauces from the southern region of Mexico take days to prepare. This is a relatively quick version of the chunky, spicy, and chocolatey, mole negro or “black sauce.” To experience the full flavors of peppers, native spices, and fresh chocolate, book a culinary vacation to Oaxaca, Mexico, the Land of Seven Moles, where you can explore a district known as the Trail of Chocolate. In the meantime, get fresh ingredients from your local farmers’ market. You can substitute jalepeños for the poblano chiles, but the dark dried ancho and mulato chiles are important to bring the sauce to its characteristic deep chocolate brown. This will make a large batch of sauce designed to thin and use for a meal, then freeze and thaw as needed.

Bring the goodness of chocolate to your own soap with this simple recipe. You’ll be tempted to wash your mouth out with this soap . . . but don’t!

When you make your own massage oil, you’ll experience surprising warmth, richness, and childlike feelings of happiness—similar to the well-being that a cup of hot cocoa brings. Antioxidant rich, all-natural grapeseed and almond oils help transport your body and soul to a place of sweet relaxation. This massage oil is very dark brown and brings a light brown color to your skin that easily can transfer to towels or clothes—after all, you are slathered in chocolate! Rinse off with warm wet cloths or a hot shower before you face the world.

Sugarplums, made famous by the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker Suite, is an old-fashioned English word for candy. It evokes the sweet glory of a dried plum, also known as a prune. Lately, body-cleansing properties of prunes have made them embarrassing. But so what if they are healthy? They are also beautifully sweet like candy, full of wrinkle-fighting antioxidants, and charged with fiber and vitamins. In this recipe, with an assist from dark chocolate, prunes regain their rightful place as sugarplums. This sauce makes a fine duet with ice cream or a slice of pound cake (see Breakfast-in-Bed Pound Cake, page 26).

Start with a simple, odorless lotion, or use a foot lotion that already contains strong peppermint extracts, such as the Body Shop’s Peppermint Cooling Foot Lotion (see Shopping Sources Guide, page 143). Or, why not make your own lotion? See page 65 for Hint of Cocoa Body Lotion.

This is a classic fudge with the full flavors of fine chocolate and cooked cream. You’ll need a small, heart-shaped cookie cutter. Otherwise, you can cut it into simple squares or triangle shapes.

What better way to indulge in a little chocolate than by adding it to a plethora of healthy greens, pine nuts, and feta cheese? You’ll be looking for an excuse to eat your vegetables with this surprising twist on vinaigrette.

At the moment chocolate melts together with cream, butter, and vanilla, the senses awaken. Taste and texture are the stars of this warm, drippy dessert. For a gourmet add-on, make your own cookies to dip in the fondue.

This tart combines the pleasures of a rich chocolate custard with the crunchy appeal of a chocolate chip cookie. As with most pies and tarts, you have two steps: the crust and the filling. Collect the ingredients for both the crust dough and the filling, but make the dough first. As it chills, prepare the filling.

No apologies here. These are dense and decadent. You’ll want to use a strong dark chocolate—something that stands up to the richness of great butter, fresh eggs, and a lot of sugar.

A slice of this chocolate-ribboned cake served on a tray with a cup of hot cocoa, a glass of chilled juice, and a boiled egg, accompanied by a newspaper and a little flower in a vase, will please the soul of any chocolate lover lying in bed. Not so sure? Add a chocolate glaze (see Glaze of the Gods, page 118) and you’ll be guaranteed entry into the boudoir of chocolate heaven.

Handmade caramel is sophisticated and soothingly sweet, especially when combined with the bold flavors of artisan chocolate. You can also dip these bonbons in tempered chocolate before you dust them to create chocolate caramel truffles.

When strawberries are in season, this recipe is not only extremely affordable, it’s amazingly scrumptious. With each bite, you taste fresh strawberries followed by a hit of chocolate that lingers perfectly. I’ve come to love this recipe as a topping for low-fat whole-grain waffles and low-fat pancakes, as a dip for cinnamon flatbread sticks, and even as a topping for fat-free vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Whether your strawberries were cold or not when you started preparing this tapenade, it’s best to refrigerate it until they are fully chilled after being mashed.

Okay, this recipe is simple, but last year when I told a friend I was going to write this book he said I had to include it. I’d never heard of doing this, nor had a number of my friends. In fact, though I found many friends who made a version including marshmallows over a campfire as a kid, I didn’t find one other person who’d actually made this. So I’m guessing that most folks won’t have had it before. Trust me; if you like bananas and chocolate, you’ll wish you’d tried it sooner!

Anyone who knows me knows that although I’ve maintained a fifty-five-pound weight loss for close to twenty years, I proudly eat chocolate every day. Here’s a great example of how I can face my chocolate craving head-on, even at breakfast!