Ah!!! Enjoying Second Semester!

All along, I have heard so many people talk about how relaxing and fun second semester of b-school is. Until last week, this was definitely not my experience!! Part of that I did to myself by taking two experiential learning classes that required a lot of time outside of class, but part of it just happened.

I was in full-blown internship search mode from January through April when I finally got my first offer. Let's just say that this took about 5-20 hours of my week every week. From driving to interviews to writing tons of cover letters, it was a very time consuming process. I became extremely worried when I finished the on-campus recruiting season without having had any second round interviews. In reality, it was a great thing that I didn't get a job during this period as most of the really interesting jobs with technology companies were posted after Spring Break. I'm definitely glad that I waited. I got a great offer working with Yahoo! as a product manager which is exactly the role that I wanted.

I've definitely been reminded lately that we all need a break. Haas participated in Challenge4Charity weekend at Stanford with 8 other MBA programs a couple of weeks ago. Spending two days outside in the gorgeous CA sun, running around, and playing games with classmates while not talking at all about work was definitely what I needed. I'm making a point to do this more often and take one day a weekend off from doing a ton of work.

This week has just been blissful! Meetings have calmed down. I've had time to catch up on some of my favorite tv shows that I've been very behind on and go out and socialize with my classmates before everyone heads off to their internships this summer. I even had time to bake not one but two! chocolate decadences! Fabulous!!! I can only hope the last several weeks of school are as good as this one has been!!!

Glazed Chocolate Pumpkin Bundt Cake

My study group has been teasing me all semester that I haven't made any of my infamous desserts for them yet, so I decided to have everyone over for a post Fall A celebration. One of my classmates heard that I was baking and after reading my blog implored me to blog about this and make sure to share a photo. So, you can thank her for making sure that I took the time to blog about this one and remembered to take a picture of my creation.

Upon moving to business school, I sent some of my most prized cooking and baking tools to my parent's house because I figured that I would spend too much time studying and doing other things to have time for cooking. Boy, I couldn't have been more wrong. Dinner parties are totally in! But, alas, many of these essential baking gadgets are still at my parent's house which is why this bundt cake was made in an angel food cake pan.

If you're looking for a very easy recipe this holiday season, this one's for you. Total active time on this cake was about 30 mins. 30 MINS! Yes, you too can make beautiful baked goods to bring for your loved ones. You do have to make sure that you're home for the next hour or so, but you can be working away on other things.

The cake part of this recipe is phenomenal. It was very moist and the chocolate and pumpkin flavors blended together beautifully. I have to say that I was rather disappointed with the buttermilk glaze on the cake. It's really sweet in contrast to the well balanced cake and really didn't add anything for me. If you're a cake person, but not a frosting person, I'd recommend leaving the buttermilk glaze off.

All in all, for 30 mins of work, this was a highly delicious cake! Happy Thanksgiving to all of you out there! I can't wait to hear about the tasty treats that you enjoy this week!

If you'd like to make your own Glazed Chocolate Pumpkin Bundt Cake, please check out the recipe from Eating Well here.

S'mores Cheesecake

I happened to find a bit of time during my post-midterms weekend to bake this S'mores Cheesecake for a potluck. Sadly, my baking has become a by request only thing that happens once in a time. But, this recipe was great! It tasted just like a s'more!!

The recipe specifies that the cheesecake needs to be chilled for 8 hours before you put the marshmallow on top. You do really need to do that. I didn't and the marshmallow topping became a bit oozy and made a nice sticky mess. Also, you definitely HAVE to brown the marshmallow topping under the broiler or use a creme brule torch, if you have one. It was the best finishing touch and really added the essential s'mores flavor to the cheesecake. However, watch your cheesecake closely while it's under the broiler. I was amazing by just how quickly it started to smolder.

If you'd like to make your own S'mores Cheesecake, check out the recipe here.

Way Too Many Cookies and Ice Creams

With the end of Dessert Nights getting closer and closer, I keep trying to out do myself with each new dessert. This week I went a bit overboard, but July is National Ice Cream Month so we had to have ice cream. And what goes better with ice cream than cookies! On a different note, I accidentally selected 3 of the 4 recipes for the week from either David Lebowitz's blog or his ice cream cookbook, The Perfect Scoop, but since they are so delectable it didn't matter.

Peanut butter and chocolate has long been a favorite flavor combination of dessert night goers, so it was only fitting to make sure that at least one of this week's cookies had this flavor combo. Baking Bites just happened to suggest a recipe that combines everyone's favorite, the brownie, with a peanut butter cookie. This recipe calls for chopped brownies in the batter. Instead of making my own brownies, I went to Whole Foods and picked up some of their brownies in their bakery. Very tasty! This recipe is super easy and requires no special mixers or anything to make and was delicious. If you'd like to make your own Peanut Butter Brownie cookies, check out the recipe here.

Madelines quickly became the other cookie of choice because my cousin just bought me a madeline pan. Unfortunately, you do have to have a madeline pan for these tasty cakey cookies. They are generally rather inexpensive for a decent one, but this may be a barrier for some of you out there. Contrary to popular thought, these cookies are super easy to make, but I will warn you that they take forever! Each step is rather time consuming particularly if you're modifying your kitchen gadgets to act as other things like a strainer as a sifter and such. Definitely liberally butter and flour the madeline pan otherwise you're going to have a tough time getting these little guys out of the pan. I opted to use the baking powder to make sure my cookies were a bit fluffy, but honestly they ended up not flattening out well so were a bit rounded. I'd probably try without the baking powder next to see what happens. All in all, they were super tasty. If you'd like to make your own Madelines, check out the recipe here. (Note: the recipe calls for a lemon glaze which sounded super tasty, but I opted to leave that out.)

Finally for the ice creams, I opted for a simple Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream because it was very easy to make and I love the flavor of all summer berries. Unfortunately, I can't share the recipe for this with you at this time because I've already packed my copy of The Perfect Scoop. The recipe is in there and I highly recommend that cookbook if you like ice creams or even if you have an ice cream maker and don't know what to do with it. When I finish moving, I'll try to remember to post the recipe.

The Absinthe Ice Cream was the most anticipated ice cream of the evening. Absinthe has such a unique flavor that I imagined it would make a very delicious ice cream after seeing David Lebowitz's blog about it. I also happened to have a small bottle of Absinthe lying around which was perfect for this recipe. As far as ice cream recipes go, the ones that are more involved are the custard based ice creams, like this one. Those aren't that bad either, but between the Madelines and the Absinthe Ice Cream, I think I used about 70% of my kitchen utensels. For the chocolate chips in this recipe, I finally found that you can buy dark chocolate chunks (like you see in professional ice creams) at Whole Foods! It was a great discovery and these added a great counter-flavor to the licorice in the absinthe. This was definitely my favorite ice cream of the evening. To make your own Absinthe Ice Cream, check out the recipe here.

Sadly, next Tuesday marks the end of an era with the last Dessert Night. I still don't know what I'm going to be making yet, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

Strawberry Tart with Oatmeal Shortbread Crust and Chocolate Ganache

It was another Mystery Box week and summer brings some of the most tasty fruit add ons. ChuThis and I decided to share a flat of the most tasty strawberries ever. Of course half a flat of strawberries was much too much for me to eat before they started to go bad, so I decided to share them with Dessert Night.

ChuThis sent me a host of strawberry tart recipes - one with port sauce, one with balsalmic sauce, and the one that I chose for this week's dessert. Chocolate and strawberries is always a good combination. That's just what you find in this tart. It starts with an oatmeal shortbread crust that is like the best oatmeal cookie you've ever tasted. Then comes a layer of chocolate ganache to keep the crust from getting soggy and adding that rich chocolate taste that meshes so well with the strawberries. The marscapone cream comes next mixed with chocolate shavings. The final topping on the tart is nothing more than those tasty strawberries. They were ripe to the point of being so naturally sweet that they were just the perfect top to the creamy marscapone and the chocolate.

All in all, it was a very tasty dessert. If you'd like to make your own, check out Apartment Therapy's blog post here. The recipes are all over the place for this one so you'll have to kind of piece them together, but I promise that the result is worth it.

Chocolate Chip Angel Food Cupcakes

As you noticed in last week's post, this week's dessert was a runner up for last week's. Everyone strongly voted the Chocolate Chip Angel Food Cupcakes as their second favorite dessert.

The recipe for these was very easy to follow and the use of a muffin pan means that no special equipment is required since I'm assuming that most of you have made cupcakes before. I must say that even though I wasn't entirely paying attention when I made these so there was an additional egg white in the recipe and I forgot to add the vanilla. This is just one of the hazards of baking while on conference calls and doing 5 other things. Despite these errors, these cupcakes still tasted great. I used dark chocolate chunks for the chocolate chips and they added a great flavor to the light angel food cake. I am a huge fan of angel food cake so I really liked these cupcakes a lot. If you'd like to make your own, go here for the recipe.

Apologies for the very terrible picture of this week's dessert. At least there is a picture, but I'll try to make sure that it's actually decipherable next week.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream & Strawberry Sherbert

Thank you to all of you who participated in my ice cream survey. The results were not what I was expecting. Most people wanted ice cream with fruit in the first question, followed by something with nuts. The second question though showed that Ben & Jerry's is the preferred ice cream brand by far. This question had the most responses for an ice cream with stuff in it, like Phish food, cookie dough, or cookies and cream. The other most mentioned desired flavor was vanilla with some kind of fruit in it.

Knowing that, I set out to pick one fruit flavored ice cream and one intensely flavored chocolate based ice cream. The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz is definitely my go to book for all ice creams. That's where I found the most amazing Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream recipe with peanut butter patties mixed in. It had the qualities of cookie dough with the peanut butter chunks, but also the intensity of the chocolate that you'd find in a Phish food. As with all ice creams, the recipe is exceedingly easy. Just throw everything in a pot, boil for a bit, chill, and throw in the ice cream maker. If you want to make your own chocolate peanut butter ice cream, check out this link for the online recipe or pick up your own copy of The Perfect Scoop.

For my fruity ice cream, Candace had been flipping through my latest Eating Well magazine and come across a great recipe for Strawberry Sherbert. What I liked about this recipe was that it used buttermilk instead of half and half so added a bit of a sour flavor to the sweetness of the strawberries. Honestly, I would have probably added more strawberries in comparison to the volume of buttermilk because I wanted a bit more of a strawberry flavor, but it was still great as is. The recipe is below for those of you who'd like to make your own.


Strawberry Sherbert (from Eating Well):
2 cups chopped fresh or frozen (not thawed) strawberries, divided
1/2 cup sugar
2 1/2 cups nonfat or low-fat buttermilk
1/2 cup half and half
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

1. Combine 1 cup of berries and sugar in a small bowl and let sit, stirring occaisonally until the sugar has begun to dissolve, about 10 minutes. Transfer the berry mixture to a food processor or blender and process until smooth.
2. Meanwhile, combine buttermilk, half and half, lemon juice, vanilla, and salt in a medium bowl. Press the strawberry mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into the bowl. Stir, cover and chill for at least 2 hours or up to 1 day.
3. Whisk the sherbert mixture and pour into the canister of an ice cream maker. Freeze according to the manufacturer's directions. During the last 5 minutes of freezing, add the remaining 1 cup chopped berries. If necessary, place the sherbert in the freezer to firm up before serving. (If the sherbert becomes very hard in the freezer, soften it in the refridgerator for about 30 mins before scooping.) Makes 8 servings.

Cherry Ice Cream with White Chocolate and Dark Chocolate

I've been looking for slightly lighter desserts recently hence the recent panna cotta and this week's ice cream. I know recipes with cream aren't usually considered lighter, but at least both had a significant amount of fruit in them. Berries of all kinds are my favorite fruits and J loves cherries, so I usually look for recipes with any of those fruits. I happened to come across a tasty recipe for Cherry Ice Cream with White Chocolate Chunks care of Technicolor Kitchen. This brought on the great debate about whether to use white chocolate or dark chocolate in this recipe.

This seems to be a rather contentious food topic where people dig in their heals and remain entrenched in their opinions of which is better. Personally, I like both, but understand that people who don't like white chocolate often site the fact that it doesn't taste like real chocolate as their reasoning. Ideally, the food inventors probably should have named white chocolate something else and we would have avoided the majority of this argument today, but I digress. Back to which chocolate to use in this recipe. I decided that I would use a combination of white and dark chocolate because I really like the extreme sweetness of the white chocolate and the intense chocolate flavor of dark chocolate. In the end, I threw in a bit of milk chocolate as well because I had just less than 2oz of dark chocolate and no time for another trip to the grocery store.

I think it turned out really well! The flavors complemented each other nicely and the sweetness of the chocolate didn't overpower the cherry flavor in the ice cream. Stay tuned for Irish Carbomb Cupcakes and Dessert Night's celebration of St. Patrick's Day next week!!!

Chocolate Bourbon Cake and Gingerbread House Making!

Dessert Night got into the holiday spirit last week with lots of Gingerbread house making. People decided that they wanted to make their own gingerbread house so we had 8 of them being made at once! Luckily I have a small island in my kitchen otherwise my small apartment couldn't have handled all of this madness. Here are a few of the photos from the gingerbread house making.




ChuThis also was able to join us this week since she got a nice break from all of her traveling for work! She found a recipe for Chocolate Bourbon cake earlier in the week and decided to make it for dessert night. Check out the beautiful cake. I'll let her share the recipe and her baking experience with you on her blog. Stay tuned for that one!


This week we also enjoyed the second cake in Rick's Web 2.0 cake series, the Blogger Cake. It was a very tasty funfetti cake that actually had a pint of ice cream mixed into the batter so it had a different consistency than the funfetti cakes I usually make. It was very delicious. Check out the nice frosting work on the Blogger logo.


Happy Holidays from everyone at Dessert Night to you and your family! We're taking a couple of weeks off and will come back with a bang in 2009! Wishing you a save and enjoyable holiday season with lots of yummy sweet treats because you deserve the best!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip and Chocolate Marshmallow Cloud Cookies

This week, Ryan and Tara baked since I've been so busy doing multiple choice problems in preparation for my GMAT test on Monday.

Ryan tracked down his mom's award winning, according to him, oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe. I must say I breathed a sigh of relief when I remembered that he said oatmeal chocolate chip cookies instead of oatmeal raisin cookies. Several dessert night regulars, including J and ChuThis, don't like raisins. Here's a pic of the tasty cookies:


Tara brought over these very tasty chocolate cookies with marshmallows stirred into the batter. They were really really tasty, especially after dipping them in a glass of milk! I totally misunderstood that Tara was bringing cookies, so I went in search of milk for hot chocolate that I thought we'd stick these marshmallow clouds in, but I was mistaken. Good thing I had the milk to dunk the cookies. Mmm, marshmallow clouds!


Also, this week, we bid temporary farewell to our good friend Neena. She's returning home to Texas for a month or so and we all will miss her terribly while she's gone.

Farewell Miss Neena!!! We're going to miss you!

Happy Birthday J!!!!!

Happy 26th Birthday J!!!! You can officially round up to 30 now. Ok, enough giving him a bad time for being old and on to describing his very tasty cake.

A month or so ago when I asked him if he wanted to keep Dessert Night on his birthday, he decided that he did and that he either wanted Chocolate Zucchini Cake, which is mom always makes for him, or something chocolatey and peanut buttery. I decided it was best to leave the Chocolate Zucchini cakes to his mom and instead find a tasty chocolate peanut butter dessert. After much searching for possible tasty recipes, I settled on this Chocolate Peanut Butter cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

The recipe posed several challenges for me as this is probably the nicest cake I've attempted to make in a long time. First of all, it's always challenging to bake a 3 layer cake in only 2 cake pans, but I managed to quickly swap one of them out in time to bake the other one before anything bad happened to the remaining dough. The cake part turned out really tasty and fluffy. I will definitely be making it again. Second, the recipe was rather long as there were 3 pieces to it and somehow I managed to not read the entire recipe the first, second or even third time around which resulted in 4 trips to the grocery store to acquire all of the ingredients for this recipe.


All in all, it turned out really well and was surprisingly not too sweet after all of the sugar that went into it. I highly recommend that you follow Deb's notes with the recipe about chilling the cake at certain points in the assembly process as they really make it much easier to put together. The only thing I'd add in addition to her notes is that the recipe for the glaze seems to make a lot more than you actually need for this cake so you might try putting only about 2/3 of the glaze on the cake at first and then adding more later if you need it.

Spooky Dessert Night!

Given that this past Tuesday was so close to Halloween and I've been reading about cute spooky desserts all month, I decided that I should have a Halloween themed Dessert Night! We of course had to do the traditional activity of carving pumpkins so this was a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pumpkin) event.




I also learned that J has never had a caramel apple before!! I was shocked as they are one of my favorite sweet things. Every time I'm home in Carmel, CA, I go to Pieces of Heaven in the Barnyard because they have a wonderful assortment of caramel apples ranging from the most basic caramel apple to crazy caramel apples that have chocolate sauce, marshmellows, nuts and chocolate chips. So good! So I had to introduce J to a caramel apple (though he still hasn't eaten one because they took so long to set after coating them...it's a work in progress). Check out the tasty apples that we made.


Now for the desserts! I had a VERY hard time deciding between all of the really cute spooky desserts that I heard about. I finally settled on Vampire Cupcakes and Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars mainly because the Vampire Cupcakes were just too cute, and I really wanted an excuse to eat the lime green and purple (my favorite colors) M&Ms that were required for the cookie bars.


I totally cheated and made the Vampire Cupcakes with cupcake mix, canned cherry pie filling, and premade frosting, but it was really the final effect that mattered. You can see the "blood" oozing out of the middle of the cupcake here.

The Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars turned out great despite the fact that I was definitely not reading the recipe carefully when I was making them and thus made a lot of mistakes. First of all, I put the whole amount of flour into the batter at the beginning instead of reserving some for the white cookie layer on top that you make later. To fix this, I added additional flous to the white cookie mixture and hoped for the best. Next, I didn't combine the melted butter and the cocoa powder before adding it to the dough. Actually, I thought the recipe required 1 1/3 cups of cocoa powder instead of just 1/3 cup. So after dumping all of that cocoa powder in there (luckily I hadn't really mixed yet), I had to dump it back out and start over combining the cocoa powder with the melted butter. Luckily, whatever I did seems to have made the cookies better. They were so tasty!!! I can't even begin to explain and, despite all of the sugar and candy in them, they weren't that sweet.


All in all, it was a really fun Halloween themed Dessert Night.

Mexican Brownies and Strawberry Rhubarb Tartlettes (again)

Dessert night again enjoyed some yummy desserts care of Pebble Beach Co. This week, we had Mexican Chocolate Brownies and Strawberry Rhubarb Tartlettes. They were very yummy! I really like the Strawberry Rhubarb Tartlettes. For some reason, they are really satisfying to me and aren't too too sweet.

Here's a photo of this week's poster child of dessert night Ryan making tea.


Next week, we will be enjoying a tasty treat from Carly! I can't wait to taste it. Stay tuned for more.

Chocolate Amaretto Bundt Cake

Recently, I've been making a lot of cookies or other smaller and less dense desserts and it's been a while since we've had a good basic cake. I decided that this week needed to be the week for that cake. Bundt cakes are some of my favorite because they don't have frosting which is a plus since I believe that good cakes don't require frosting and in fact can make the cake taste worse if there is frosting.

Break or Bake recently appeared in my Google Reader with this recipe. I remembered somewhere deep in the caverns of my brain that J loves the flavor of amaretto which is nice since I have to avoid so many recipes because of his dislike of citrus flavored baked goods.

This recipe is really easy, but it has reminded me yet again how much I really would benefit from a mixer. It would be one of those kitchen appliances that would join a select number that constantly take up the small space available on my counter top. The mixer would live right next to the only other appliance that currently hangs out on my counter which is my tea pot. However, I'm not yet willing to make that $300 commitment that would get my the brushed steel KitchenAid mixer of my dreams. In the meantime, J's grandma's hand mixer comes in VERY handy on a weekly basis.

I really thought that this was one of my best desserts. The cake turned out really moist and very flavorful. Neither the chocolate or the amaretto flavor was too overwhelming which was nice.

If you'd like to make your own Chocolate Amaretto Bundt Cake, please go here. I will add pictures of this lovely cake care of Neena and Candace as soon as I receive them from them.

Lots of Cookies

This week, I decided that we should try some of the cookie recipes that I've been saving from all of the dessert blogs that I read. I wanted to finish using the buttermilk that I bought for last week's cobbler, so I had to try the Buttermilk Cookies. Also, I love how easy and yummy bar cookies are so I decided to try the Raspberry Hazelnut Crumble Bars. Finally, everyone loves a little chocolate and peanut butter so I thought I'd try the Chunky Peanut, Chocolate, and Cinnamon Cookies.

I didn't have enough semi sweet chocolate chips for the peanut/chocolate cookies so I threw in some darker chocolate chips. As I dark chocolate lover, I think it adds a really unique flavor to the peanut butter. They were really easy to make and made closer to 4 dozen cookies instead of the daunting 5 dozen forecasted by the recipe.


The Raspberry Hazelnut Bars called for an 8 x 8 pan for the bar cookies. I followed those directions and this resulted in a 2 inch deep cookie. I think next time I will spread out these cookies farther so they are a bit thinner and more the shape of a traditional bar cookie.


The buttermilk cookies were AMAZING. From the moment that the oven started to smell like sweet well made pancakes, I knew I was going to love them. But add a little glaze and I'm head over heals for these little guys. They were so light and cakey and the little bit of glaze on top added just a tad of sweetness that really rounded out the flavor of these cookies. I didn't put the lemon zest in the cookies that the recipe requires but I have a feeling that if you do it will add a whole new dimension to these cookies. It's a really good thing that I put these in the freezer after dessert night otherwise I might have eaten all 3 dozen myself!


The best thing about all of these recipes was that they could all be made either in the Cuisinart or with the hand mixer. It was a quick and dirty baking night. I really appreciate all of Tara's help. This week's dessert night would not have been possible without her. Feel free to check out the links above to make these cookies for yourself.

Here are the boys watching numerous YouTube videos. Notice how the girls have all found something better to do...

Chocolate Angel Food Cake and Fresh Raspberries

I was lazy again this week. Yes, I had no excuse like last week and this week I even went so far as resorting to store bought desserts. I am hanging my head in shame right now and promise to do better next week.

Nonetheless, this week we enjoyed a lovely Chocolate Angel Food Cake, care of Safeway's bakery, and some fresh raspberries. Sadly, there are not even pics of this yummy dessert. I was totally slacking this week.

Besides dessert (which was obviously not the focal point this week), Tara brought her newly purchased Tiny Toons DVD that we thoroughly enjoyed along with numerous YouTube videos.

I must also give a shout out to the new people this week! Neena and Kacy joined us. They went to college with Tara and J and I met them at Elizabeth's wedding two weekends ago. We're all glad that they've moved to the Bay Area and joined the Dessert Night clan.

Brownie Peanut Butter Cups

This week's dessert night was a rather last minute endeavor as our plane landed from our weekend in Colorado (the subject of a later blog) 5.5 hours prior to dessert night. I had not previously selected what I was going to make nor had I made sure to have the ingredients on hand before we left for Colorado. So I was looking for something quick and tasty at the same time.

I happened upon this recipe for Brownie Peanut Butter Cups in my Google Reader because I had no doubt starred it a long time ago thinking that I should save it because J loves peanut butter so. It turned out that I had all of the ingredients except chocolate chips and peanut butter chips already on hand. I ended up getting Reese's Pieces (small peanut butter M&Ms) instead of the peanut butter chips because I couldn't find any quickly at Safeway.

They came out great...just like they were supposed to. My only complaint is that they were MUCH too sweet. The brownie mixture was almost mixed with an equal quantity of candy which was just a little intense, but they do look pretty.



If you'd like to make your own, go here.

Chocolate Cherry Cake Squares

Cherries are a wonderful and yummy summer fruit. ChuThis and I have been talking about cherries a lot since she and our other friend T got 10 lbs. of cherries from the Mystery Box farm a couple of weeks ago. (They were AMAZING cherries btw.) Also, cherries are pretty much a sure fire way to make sure I'm on J's good side as they are his favorite.

With all of these thoughts of cherries on my mind and no recipe for dessert night as of Monday morning, I embarked on a Google search for recipes with cherries. It was this search that brought me the Chocolate Cherry Cake recipe. Given how popular Cherry M&Ms have been with my circles this summer (if you haven't tried them yet, I highly recommend that you do), I have really enjoyed the flavors of chocolate and cherry together.

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that after all of this discussion of fresh cherries, I did use frozen ones in this recipe. It didn't matter as it was still very good. This is a really easy recipe to make. Just remember to soak the cherries in sugar and almond flavoring before you're ready to make the cake. I did soak the cherries for about 4 hours instead of the recommended 2, but I'm not sure that it made a difference for the flavor. I also didn't do the powdered sugar on top of the cake squares as I've never been a fan of powdered sugar. But it can help the visual appeal of a less than perfect baked good.

Sadly, there are no photos this week as I was in such a hurry to get dessert on the table and it was so popular that it went quickly. I'll have to be sure to get back on the photos for next week.

Want to make your own Chocolate Cherry Cake Squares? Here you go...

Chocolate Chip Cheesecake & Scallion & Brie Stuffed Burgers

Last night was quite the culmination of a variety of different culinary experiences and requests that lead to the meal. Let me back up a bit and explain.

About two weeks ago when Garrett finalized his schedule (ok, at least part of it) for his visit to CA and told me that he was going to be in town over a Tuesday night, I immediately invited him to dessert night and being the out of town guest for the evening, also asked for his dessert of choice. Much deliberation ensued. Eventually, he decided that he wanted Chocolate Chip Cheesecake, thus the cheesecake portion of the meal.

The burger idea came from a series of events that led me to the new Food & Wine magazine. At brunch with my family on Mother's Day at the Corkscrew Restaurant in Carmel Valley, I saw a cheeseburger with Gruyere instead of the usual cheddar. It sounded amazing, but alas I didn't order it. I was later reading through my latest edition of Food & Wine where I found a recipe for Scallion & Brie stuffed burgers. It sounded amazing given my love for brie. As usual, I look for excuses to cook for others because I'm not a huge eater myself and don't like tons of leftovers. So, last night was the perfect excuse to make these little guys.

They tasted amazing, but were rather hard to put together so the two hamburger patties didn't separate as they were cooked. J did an awesome job cooking the burgers!!! And Garrett was very helpful chopping everything that we needed for the meal.

All in all, it was a very yummy evening.

Here's Candace attempting to devour the cheesecake.

Dulce de Leche Chocolate Chunk Bread Pudding

Wow, it's taken me a really long time to get this post out this week. It has been a very busy week. This week, I had no idea what I was going to make for dessert night. Luckily ChuThis stepped in and provided a recipe that she's been wanting to try. It fit all of my criteria for my available schedule this week for dessert making so I tried it.

The recipe calls for an egg bread of some sort. The only already made, widely known egg bread that I could think of was challah and since it's around Passover, it was widely available. The only thing that would make me consider not using challah next time is it's distinct taste.

All in all, it was very good. You definitely need to have lots of extra dulce de leche sauce and vanilla ice cream to go along with it.

It was so enticingly good that we ate almost half of it before I remembered to take the picture.

Click here to find the recipe care of Epicurious.