Double Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes
Chocolate. My all-time favorite food, and favorite baking ingredient (only second to butter)… the word excites so many senses. Chocolate bark, chocolate bars, chocolate chips, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, cacao beans, cocoa nibs, I’ll take it any way I can get it. I hear the mention of chocolate and I feel giddy with excitement. Chocolate is my first love, and while not my only one, I still find it to be completely perfect, and delicious in it’s perfection. Especially the extra dark, extra bitter variety — can’t go wrong there. So it’s with a great proclamation of love that I bring you this, the masterpiece to end all chocolate masterpieces, DOUBLE CHOCOLATE FUDGE cupcakes. (more…)
Double Chocolate Velvet Cake
Every once in a while, after a super savory supper, I get a serious craving for something chocolate; deep, dark, chocolate, in the form of a cookie or cake, brownie or bar, something to satisfy the strongest of cravings. Chocolate is the quintessential treat to me, and when it’s baked into a decadent dessert, I have a great excuse to have a huge hunk of it. A huge hunk of pure chocolate? Seems excessive and like a no-good idea, but baked into layers of flour, butter, sugar and vanilla, a thick slice sounds like just what the doctor ordered. That’s horrific logic if I’ve ever heard it, but it works for me! (more…)
Pumpkin Cheesecake with Gingersnap Crust
Even though Thanksgiving is long gone by now, I’m still dreaming about this dessert I made for it. Better late than never, and this recipe is too good to pass up! When I was in high school, I was part of a culinary arts program, and I can still remember to this day a particular pumpkin cheesecake that we made, which I enjoyed with my mom and her best friend in the car en route to a couple of college visits I had lined up. I’d just made it that afternoon in class, and when I got in the car we were all a bit hungry, so forks dove into the cheesecake as soon as we hit the road and it was just SO GOOD. I came across that same hand-written recipe from class earlier this year amongst a stack of my mom’s recipes, and it reminded me of that day and of that cheesecake, and made me crave it in a serious way.
