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

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.

I have been making pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for years, but I have never found a recipe that I loved enough that it was worth sharing with you. That changed today, my friends. After tinkering with several recipes, I found that this one packed the most flavor and, if you have a tender hand, it also has the best texture. Not only that, but with a full cup of pumpkin, I think these cookies may actually be classified as a health food.

This was posted by my blogging friend Sherron at Simply Gourmet Photography. Don’t look at her site. Ever. Because if you do, I may lose you forever as a reader, and that would be so sad. It’s just that her pictures are sooooo compelling. Anyway, enough about her. This is about me  you. And these cookies. Let’s get baking.

Before we begin, I have a confession. I did not make these. I delegated the task to two of my favorite students who were here baking with me to prep for this shower. I figured that this recipe was easy enough to leave them to do on their own. Sure enough, they handled it like champs. If high schoolers can make this, YOU can make it. And you won’t at all regret the decision to do so.

Just like the chocolate things, these need a new name. I’ve been calling them cheesecake truffle bombs when talking with my friends about them, but I didn’t want you to think that I called them that because they were a bomb. Quite the opposite! They were a hit! Who doesn’t love mounds of cream cheese dipped in chocolate, sprinkled with pecans, and drizzled with hot caramel?

My mom and dad, some of my biggest food critics, wanted these to have a more pronounced cream cheese flavor. I would recommend using the smaller amount of graham crackers in the cream cheese mixture to start, and then adding more to taste. You want the mixture to have some tang because the chocolate and caramel add plenty of sweetness. I also might suggest sprinkling these with a few flecks of fleur de sel before serving. You know me… I love adding salt to just about anything.

First, let’s have a moment of silence while we all wipe the drool off of our chins. Done yet? Okay, me too.

Next, let’s consider how the original creator of this recipe gave something so divine looking such a completely un-divine name: “chocolate things.” No joke. That’s the official name. If I didn’t love chocolate more than almost anything, I may have skipped over the recipe altogether. I’m so glad I didn’t. This is a new favorite, and given that it is relatively easy to make, I would rate it 5 stars. All hail the chocolate things. Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!

If you’re a bread maker, you should know that this dough is going to be very, very soft. At first, I figured I must have forgotten to add a cup of flour. I actually remeasured all the ingredients in separate bowls on a scale and compared that to my dough weight. Nope. The dough was right. It’s just a very, very buttery dough. Go with it. All that moistness translates into divine goodness after it’s baked!

Look at me, being amazing! See that beautiful new recipe format below? Yeah, that’s inspiration from my dear friend Nicole at Heat Oven to 350. Nicole regularly suggests what I should be doing to improve my blog. God bless her because clearly I’m clueless. This Ziplist thing is pretty cool! You can set up a ZipList account and then save any recipes that strike your fancy to your list. Certainly beats my I-clearly-grew-up-in-the-90s method of printing every single recipe that appeals to me and then sorting them into binders. One day I’ll grow up and get all techy. Until then, pen and paper for me!

Back to the recipe….. My husband’s favorite ice cream is mint chip. But he’s particular about his mint chip. It has to be mint chip with chocolate shavings. No chips or chunks or cookies or anything else for him. Shavings. Only shavings. You want to know who makes mint chocolate chip with shavings? Thrifty. Rite Aid. Drug stores. You want to know what else is true about their brand of ice cream? It’s weird. I mean that. It has a weird color and the ice cream itself has a very distinctly cheap-drug-store taste. (Kind of like how I feel about their make up…) I don’t know if I have words to describe how their ice cream is weird. I just know that I don’t like it. I could see that if Brant and I were going to agree about ice cream and ensure our wedded bliss, we were going to need to find a happy medium. And here’s that medium: I make the ice cream at home and sometimes put shavings in it. Other times I put chunks in it. After all, if I have to choose between shaving a bar of chocolate into mounds of chocolate bits and just melting a bar of chocolate and drizzling it into the batter, you can bet which one I am going to choose 9 times out of 10. Drizzle it is!

Note the type of mint you’re using. Unless you already own a prolific mint plant, go with the peppermint oil to ensure that your ice cream turns out as you had expected! If you do so, you may want to add some green food coloring if you believe that mint ice cream should be green!

I have seen loads of recipes for smores cupcakes floating around the blogosphere, and everyone seems to have their own ideas about what makes the “perfect” smores cupcake. I figure that a cupcake is only worth eating if the cake part is absolutely divine, so I used my all time favorite cupcake recipe as the base. I took Annie’s Eats recommendation to put some ground up graham crackers in the bottom of the cupcake liner and used her recipe for a whipped marshmallow topping (which really is easy to make – I promise!). I also got to use my kitchen torch for the first time, and boy was that ever FUN! I may or may not have used that same torch to light the “campfire candle” in this picture. These cupcakes were a huge hit at my husband’s birthday party. I think people just love the novelty of anything that involves an open flame.

smores cupcakes
cupcake recipe from the book Modern Baker and frosting recipe from www.annies-eats.net

**note: this yields 18 cupcakes

for the graham cracker bottom:
1½ cups graham cracker crumbs
¼ cup sugar
5 1/3 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

for the chocolate cupcake:
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
4 oz unsweetened chocolate, cut into 1/4 inch pieces
1 cup boiling water
8 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
2 large eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour cream

for the marshmallow topping:
8 large egg whites, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
½ tsp. cream of tartar
2 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Line two cupcake pans with paper liners. (If you only have one muffin pan, simply cook half the graham cracker and cupcake mixture and then repeat.) In a small mixing bowl, combine the graham cracker crumbs, sugar and melted butter; mix well with a fork.  Drop a heaping 1 tablespoon of the graham cracker mixture in the bottom of each cupcake liner and press down to line the bottom. (If you have leftover graham cracker mixture, use it in this parfait.) Bake until golden and lightly fragrant, about 5 minutes.

For the cupcake batter, stir the sugar, flour, baking soda and salt together in a mixing bowl. Set aside.

Put the cut up chocolate in a large mixing bowl and pour the boiling water over it. Let stand for 2 minutes, then whisk until smooth. Whisk in the butter, then the eggs, one at a time, whisking after each addition until smooth. Whisk in the vanilla and sour cream.

Whisk in the flour and sugar mixture in 3 separate additions, whisking until smooth after each.

Divide the batter equally among the cavities in the pans, spooning it in. Bake the cupcakes until they are well risen and feel firm when pressed in the center with a fingertip, about 20 minutes.

Cool in the pans on racks for 5 minutes, then transfer the cupcakes to racks and cool completely before frosting.

To make the frosting, combine the egg whites, sugar and cream of tartar in the top of a double boiler. (Note: I just set my clean, dry mixer bowl over simmering water, to avoid dirtying two bowls.) Heat the mixture, whisking frequently, until it reaches 160° F with an instant-read thermometer. Transfer the mixture to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Whisk starting at low speed and gradually increasing to medium-high speed until stiff, glossy peaks form. Mix in the vanilla until combined. Frost cooled cupcakes. Brown with a kitchen torch and garnish with chocolate and graham cracker segments (optional).

oatmeal chocolate chip muffins
heavily adapted from www.101cookbooks.com

crumble topping*

scant 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted

muffins:

1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
scant 1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 tbsp unsalted butter, plus more for greasing the pan
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups plain yogurt
1/4 cup agave syrup or honey (I actually might add a bit more next time, but I prefer sweet muffins!)
2 large eggs, whisked
2 large handfuls chocolate chips

*I did not use all of this crumble topping. I put the rest in the freezer for the next batch of muffins!

Preheat oven to 350 with rack set in the middle of the oven. Butter muffin pan generously. Do not use cupcake liners.

To make the crumble: Use a fork to combine the flour, oats, sugar, and salt in a medium sized bowl. Stir in the melted butter. Divide the mixture into three portions and use your hands to form the portions into three patties. Place the patties on a plate in the freezer for about 10 minutes.

For the muffins: In a medium bowl, combine the oats, flours, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

In a medium, microwave safe bowl, melt the butter. Add the sugar and whisk in the yogurt and agave, followed by the eggs. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and stir until it’s almost completely mixed. Add in chocolate chips and stir just until combined. Do not over mix.

Pour the batter into the muffin cups, filling each 3/4 full. Sprinkle with a few additional chocolate chips if desired. Break off pieces of crumble and add about one tablespoon to each muffin. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick comes out with only a few crumbs attached. Let cool for 5 minutes and then carefully transfer to a cooling rack. Let cool almost completely before serving. If you have leftovers, heat them for about 10 seconds in the microwave so that the chocolate chips soften slightly.