Category Archives: Chocolate

Mad for Maple

Watching the Winter Olympics last month made me want to strap on a pair of skis or ice skates or heck, even push a strange, tea kettle-like-thang along the ice with a broom.

But mostly, it made me long for some sticky, sweet, lovely amber maple syrup.

After all, Canada (namely Quebec) produces the most maple syrup in the world. And who hasn’t come back from a Canadian vacation without arms laden with maple candy, maple butter, maple tea and maple sugar?

To satisfy my maple craving, I turned to this wonderful recipe for “Maple Blondies” from “The Ultimate Brownie Book” (William Morrow) by my friends, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough.

Bruce and Mark have to be the most prolific cookbook authors around. They’ve barely finished writing one cookbook when they’re immediately on to the next. Potatoes, frozen desserts, muffins, pizzas — is there a genre of food they haven’t written about? I doubt it.

Their newest book already has me excited. “Ham: An Obesession with the Hindquarter” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) taps into our love of all things hammy. More than 100 recipes are included for everything from “Moroccan-Style Roasted Fresh Ham” to “Filipino Twice-Cooked Pork” to “Sweet Potato Hash with Ham, Pecans and Cranberries.”

Speaking of hammy, if you’ve never caught these two doing a cooking demo, you’re missing out. These guys put Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien to shame. Picture a combination of live cooking and live stand-up comedy. Bruce and Mark can’t help themselves. They like to entertain, and they do it with aplomb.

See for yourself, 6:30 p.m. April 27, when the guys will be hosting a cooking class at Draeger’s in San Mateo. Mark and Bruce will cook four dishes from their new book, including “Indonesian Chile-Lemon Grass Ham Curry” and “Grilled Ham with Herb Spaetzle.”

Tickets are $55.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled recipe: blondies — made with 1/2 cup of real maple syrup, no less.

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One Thick, Rich Chocolate Drink and Winners of the Veggie Seeds Give-Away

Just how thick is Taza to Go, a new chocolate beverage drink?

Put it this way: To call it hot chocolate or hot cocoa would be an injustice.

Take a sip and it’s almost like pudding in your mouth.

Just look at the thick streaks it leaves on the rim of the mug above.

Super gooey, incredibly rich and with a deep, concentrated chocolate flavor, this drinking chocolate comes in an aseptic pouch ready to be enjoyed. Serve it warm or chilled over ice. You can even drizzle it over ice cream or cake.

The pouch serves two, but after trying a sample, I’d say you could easily get more servings out of it. It’s so filling that an espresso cup-full would more than satisfy most chocoholics.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of sipping hot chocolate in Spain with churros to dunk into, you’re familiar with this souped-up version of liquid chocolate. Appropriately enough, Tazo to Go is made by Valor Chocolates, a chocolatier in Spain since 1881.

A 14-ounce pouch is about $5.75, and a 32-ounce pouch is about $11.99. A 3/4 cup has 200 calories. Purchase at the Valor Chocolate site or Tienda.com.

Now, without further adieu, the winners of the Food Gal veggie seeds give-away contest, in which I asked you all to pick a fruit, vegetable or herb that was most like your personality.

I can’t tell you how many of these responses just made me chuckle in delight. But I could only pick three winners, who will each receive a load of seeds to grow lettuces and tomatoes, as well as a beautiful oval wooden cutting board — all courtesy of Cook’s Garden, a gourmet retailer of seeds. Thanks to everyone who participated in the fun. Here are the winners:

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Not So Itty-Bitty, Teenie-Weenie Polka-Dot Cake

Leopard print may be so Victoria’s Secret.

And camouflage so divisive and boldly statement-oriented.

But polka dots? Who doesn’t love the whimsy of big, bright, carefree circles covering anything and everything?

Especially when it’s crowning the top of this clever cake.

“Essence of Orange-Chocolate Wafer Cake” is from Coffee Cakes: Simple, Sweet and Savory” (Chronicle Books) by Palo Alto food writer, Lou Seibert Pappas.

It’s a super moist and dense, but tender, cake strewn with bittersweet chocolate wafers to create a fun polka-dot pattern.

I used the new TCHOPro Organic Baking Drops (66 Percent Cacao), which I recently got a sample of. The chocolate discs with the deep, pronounced flavor are $8.99 for an 8-ounce bag. E. Guittard also makes great chocolate wafers.

Besides its look, the other unusual thing about this cake? It includes one whole orange. Yup, rind, flesh, pith and all — just minus the seeds. It also includes golden raisins, but you’d never know they were there.

That’s because the orange and the raisins get pulverized in the food processor until finely ground. This sticky paste is what gives the cake its moistness. The mixture is combined with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and plain yogurt or buttermilk.

Chocolate discs are stirred into the batter before being poured into the cake pan. Then, more chocolate discs are laid over the top.

My cake took a little longer than the specified 40 minutes to bake (but I have a gas oven, too). If yours cake does, too, and it starts to brown too much, just tent it with foil to allow it to continue baking a few minutes more.

If you like candied orange rinds dipped in dark chocolate, you’ll love this cake. It tastes just like that, with a very gutsy orange flavor.

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Artsy Chocolates

Meet my edible fossil.

It looks like one doesn’t it? What with all those strange embedded pebble-like pieces stuck in it, right?

In reality, it’s a custom chocolate bar decked out like some eerie moonscape with my own chosen ingredients. In this case, a white chocolate bar strewn with an eclectic mix of orange pepper, Rice Crispies, dried orange, gold flakes and a few rather bulbous wasabi peanuts.

German chocolate start-up, Chocri, has just expanded to the U.S. market to let chocoholics design their own white, milk and dark chocolate bars with more than 100 different toppings. Yes, we’re talking everything from bacon to cheese-curry cashews to paradise grains to plum bits to organic mint leaves. Apparently, more than 10 billion combinations are possible. I’ll let you do the math.

The bars are made of organic, Fair Trade chocolate from Belgium, and many of the ingredient options are organic.

Chocri reps invited me to try three complimentary bars recently. The step-by-step design process on the Web site is straight-forward. You choose your base bar, then go to town on the toppings, choosing up to five for each 6-by-3-inch bar. You can even give your bar a name, too.

It takes about two weeks to receive your chocolate bars, which are shipped from Germany. They’re not necessarily inexpensive — my three bars were valued at a total cost of $35. One percent of every purchase is donated to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children on the Ivory Coast, the largest exporter of cocoa beans in the world. To date, Chocri donations have helped build a well, buy refrigerators and build an orphanage there.

As with custom-burger restaurants, if you hate the end product, you have no one but yourself to blame for choosing the toppings that you did. But it sure is fun to get inventive.

I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers to critique my own creations, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

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Godiva’s Cup of Joe and Winners of the Food Gal Contest

You can nibble a chocolate truffle with your coffee. Or you can sip a cup of Joe that tastes like a heavenly chocolate truffle.

You can now that Godiva Chocolatier has introduced a line of coffees inspired by their chocolate bonbons.

The flavored coffees come ground in these varieties: French Vanilla, Hazelnut Creme, Chocolate Truffle, and Caramel. Available at Safeway, SaveMart, Lucky and Raley’s, a 12-ounce bag is $8.99.

I had a chance to try samples of the Chocolate Truffle and Hazelnut Creme. I’m not always a fan of flavored coffees because some of them taste so artificial or overpowering.

The Godiva ones, though, were quite balanced. You could still taste the roasty, smooth Arabica beans that had just a twinge of that wonderful coffee bitterness even with the added chocolate or hazelnut flavorings. Indeed, the Chocolate Truffle coffee flavor is like a coffee candy that has a little rounded chocolate flavor added, as opposed to a full-on chocolate bonbon with a tiny espresso bean on top. As much of a chocoholic as I am, I think I liked the hazelnut one even more because of its nutty, almost creamy nature.

The steamy aromas are so seductive, too.

And now, for the winners of the “Spread It On” contest:

I say “winners” because I decided not only to award a grand prize of three Laxmi’s Delights flaxseed spreads, but two runners-up awards who will each receive a cookbook from my collection.

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