Two weeks since my last post. It’s not for lack of trying new recipes. I have tried several, and all have been major flops. There were “store bought cookies” that tasted nothing like the classics we grew up with. There were stews and muffins and biscuits and… well, the list is long and the results were depressing. I finally decided to go with a recipe that could not possibly fail: coffee cake, and a William Sonoma recipe to boot. And now look at me! I know it may seem absurd, but it’s February and here I am pulling out pumpkin show stoppers.  I was so nauseous all of November that I missed my pumpkin fix. After 17 looooong weeks into being pregnant, I am finally getting my appetite back. And so it’s time to pull out some of those recipes that I would have made back in autumn if I had not been so sick.

Continue reading: pumpkin streusel coffee cake

The reason I have been delinquent in posting for the last 4 months is that I am 4 months pregnant!  After two miscarriages last year, we are so thrilled to share this news. We cannot wait to meet our little guy (or girl!?!) and have our lives forever changed. In the meantime, all those pregnancy hormones have messed with my love for food. All I seem to eat these days is cereal. Life cereal. Raisin Bran. Cheerios. Frosted mini-wheats. I have a whole arsenal of cereals to eat because so far cereal has been the one thing guaranteed to taste good any time of day or night. Everything else has been hit or miss, and new recipes are *never* exciting these days. It’s challenging to blog about the new foods that I’m eating when those new foods are simply a new brand of cereal!

My appetite still isn’t what it was, but I did manage to eat some fish today, so that’s promising! While things are on the up-and-up, I’m back with a tweak on one of my favorite recipes: apple pie. I love making apple pie, but I love even more the idea of a personalized apple pie. Here I take my favorite apple pie recipe and cook it in small pots for individual servings. The best part? Layer the tops with cute cookie cutter shapes to match the seasons!

This recipe was originally posted in December 2009. I thought it needed an image makeover and the recipe is so amazing that I am re-posting it so that those of you who are new to the blog are aware of how important it is to make this. Immediately.

This aptly named dark chocolate mousse may be the death of you, but it’s oh, so worth it. I gave a dish to my mom yesterday to take home. She wrote me an email today asking me never to do that again. She takes one bite and then completely loses self control around this amazing dessert. And it’s no wonder. This recipe is from Cooks Illustrated – and boy do they know how to make a mean chocolate mousse.

Continue reading: death by chocolate mousse

Once in a while, I bake foods that I know that I won’t like. These lemon bars are among them. I just don’t love lemon enough to eat gobs of it in one dessert. A sprinkle of zest here or a dash of juice there is fine, but almost any food that is centered on lemons will not be on my top 10 list. Or even my top 20. That said, baking foods that I don’t like presents an interesting challenge: how do I judge if they are good? I have extremely high standards, so I wanted to know if these bars were worth blogging about. My friend Joy is a lemon-bar lover famous for her own lemon bar recipe. She says these are great, which means that if you like lemon bars, you’ll love these.

Continue reading: lemon bars

The first time that I made these and shared them with my foodie friend Jeremy, the first words out of his mouth after taking a bite were…well, unrepeatable here. But let’s just say that he thought these were amazing. I went to France last year and I can attest that these rivaled those decadent Parisian pastries. Perfectly flaky with a center strip of delicious dark chocolate…. oh, wow. The thought of them makes me want to sign off here and go whip up another batch.

Continue reading: chocolate croissants

I found this recipe in The Cheeseboard Collective Cookbook and almost passed it up simply because it seems that everyone already has their favorite chocolate cake. I decided to try these cakes anyway and I’m so glad that I did! They are delicious! I absolutely loved them topped with sweetened whipped cream, drizzled with a homemade chocolate syrup, and sprinkled with cocoa nibs. Divine! I plan on submitting a recipe like this to the Scharffenberger Elevate a Classic Dessert Challenge. Maybe I’ll win $10,000!

It’s a shame that I’ve been blogging for years and have never shared with you the recipe for the best chocolate chip cookie you will ever eat. I’ve been tinkering with this recipe for quite a while now and let me tell you… it’ll knock your socks off. I served it at a baby shower a few weeks ago and literally had ladies begging me with money in hand to sell them the recipe. I promised I would post the recipe soon (for free!) and then promptly forgot. Story of my life.

What makes these cookies the best? It really comes down to so many things. First, the chocolate. Don’t use chocolate chips. Use a bar of bittersweet chocolate chopped into chunks. I prefer to use Trader Joe’s Bittersweet Pound Plus Bar. Microwave it for a few seconds if it’s too hard to chop and it will soften just enough to allow a blade to cut into it. Texture is another important element to any chocolate chip cookie. These are crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. Perfection. The original cookie recipe on which this cookie is based came from some anonymous source on-line that my mom emailed to me years ago. I’d love to give credit where credit is due, but unfortunately I cannot. The baking techniques are from Pam Anderson’s book The Perfect Recipe. This is one of the few cookbooks and refer to often. The sprinkle of flaked sea salt on top was my own idea, albeit borrowed from hundreds of other such cookie recipes on the web. Altogether, this cookie is phenomenal. And the other great thing about this recipe? You can cook exactly as many cookies as you want to eat that day so you will never have to eat a stale cookie again!

I’m a true chocolate fiend, and the idea of a chocolate pudding made out of black chocolate was instantly appealing to me. (You can find black chocolate at King Arthur Flour’s website.) While I still prefer chocolate mousse to chocolate pudding any day, this was such a fun and gloriously chocolatey dessert to serve my friends and family. Be sure to have some homemade whipped cream on hand. It balances out the rich chocolate flavors!

In other news, Tesco Foods emailed me and asked if I would be willing to host a Crockpot giveaway on my blog. Of course I would! I love my crockpot and I know that many, many families rely on the ease of tossing ingredients in a slow cooker first thing in the morning so that dinner is ready when they return home from work. Many of us are hunkering down for winter or gearing up for a Christmas buying frenzy, so whether you want this Crockpot for yourself or to give as a gift to someone else, here are ways you can enter to win it! Each comment gives you one entry, so you can get a total of 4 entries!

• Leave a comment below letting me know your favorite Crockpot comfort food.
• Leave a separate comment below if you follow me on Facebook. If not, you can do so here!
• Leave a separate comment below if you follow this blog on Twitter (@divinedishes) and also tell me your twitter handle.
• Leave a separate comment below if you subscribe to the RSS feed from this blog (if you don’t already, you can easily do so now by clicking on the icon in the upper right hand corner of this page!).

(If you live in the States, your crockpot will come from Amazon.com. You can read more about it here!)

This contest will close at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, December 3, 2011. One winner will be chosen at random using Random.org.

And now…. back to our chocolate pudding.

Are you a Thanksgiving Traditionalist or a Thanksgiving Adventurer? I’m somewhere in the middle. I love the traditional Thanksgiving spread with its turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and pumpkin pie. Then again, I also love to try new recipes and some foods are only served on Thanksgiving Day, so if I am going to try them, I have to be willing to take a few risks. Pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving is no big surprise, but the layer of cheesecake in the middle takes this from a traditional pie to a delicious adventure!

The best part of this pie is that you can make it the day before and chill it overnight. That means there is one less thing for you to think about on the Big Day! Hooray!

Continue reading: pumpkin cheesecake pie

My friend Bridget asked me if I would donate cookies to her school’s fundraising event. One of the challenges of being a food blogger is finding a home for all the desserts that I bake, so these kinds of opportunities are a great excuse to try a new recipe. Bridget specifically wanted me to donate a few already-baked cookies along with a couple of bags of frozen cookie dough so that the lucky winner would not have to eat 4 dozen cookies at once. I flipped through my must-make-cookies and came across this recipe that a friend had forwarded to me months ago.

After reading the directions, I realized that their assembly was way too complicated for me to ask someone else to prepare at home. It involved dividing dough balls into disks, mashing cream cheese between the disks and pinching the dough balls together while hoping that the cream cheese would not ooze out any cracks that formed. A tester batch was in order. I prepared one cookie as directed in the recipe and two cookies with a small amount of cream cheese pressed into the center of the baked cookie. A friend dropped by randomly and we taste tested the results. The cream-cheese topped cookies were a clear winner. My friend declared these cookies some of the best snicker doodles she has ever had. I’m not usually a snicker doodle fan, but I could see why she liked them so much. They are crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and the cream cheese topping is really something special.