chocolate beet cake
When I discovered beets in my CSA basket this week I figured I had two choices: toss them directly onto the compost heap or bake them into a cake.
I don’t like cake and I don’t like beets, so I’m not sure what made me think I would like a cake made out of beets. Possibly it was the assurance that “even confirmed beet-bashers will love this cake” in the introduction to the recipe or the fact that my foodie friend Katie mentioned that she’d tried it and liked it, but I suspect it was the chocolate. Of all the ingredients on this earth, chocolate seems the most likely candidate for transforming beets from a mouthful of musty dirt into something that people might actually want to eat.
chocolate cutout cookies
Two years ago, when Chris and I still lived nearly a thousand miles apart, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, chilling and rolling and cutting small hearts out of shortbread dough, dipping freshly-baked cookies into melted chocolate, waiting for the chocolate to harden so I could nestle each little heart into a cocoon of parchment paper and bubble wrap, and generally wishing I’d chosen a slightly less complicated way to express my undying devotion.
Thus a tradition was born, minus the whole overnight shipping thing, of course. (more…)
chocolate bourbon pecan torte
I have a tendency to cling to summer, soaking up late afternoon sun on the beach, scowling at reddening leaves, and refusing to wear shoes despite my cold toes. Eventually though, I give in, and one sure sign of this acceptance of fall has traditionally been the replacement of my evening gin & tonic with a bourbon & ginger. While I’m nowhere near ready to make the annual gin to bourbon transition, the other night I did have a dream about bourbon.
More specifically, I dreamt of a dessert my friend Jess and I once shared — a chocolaty, bourbony dessert that, as I recall, was ridiculously good. So good that we talked about it for weeks afterward and actually considered holding happy hour at a restaurant with no happy hour specials simply so that we might order dessert to go. So good that one slice shared two years ago now sends visions of chocolate and bourbon dancing in my head. So good that since awakening from said visions, I’ve been able to think of little else. And so good that despite there being a nearly-full bottle of gin in the freezer and a solid month of gin-drinking weather to go, I broke down and bought a bottle of bourbon.
Just for the chocolate though. Well, and the pecans. But not for me. It is, after all, still summer. Just so we’re clear.
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When Harry Met Salad 