Chocolate

Serve this icing spooned over cake or ice cream.

Rich with chocolate and studded with bits of toasted almonds with a faint coconut flavor, this heavenly dessert is a special finish to a holiday meal. Because the leavening comes from aeration, it is essential that the ingredients be at room temperature before assembling the batter.

In honor of the Girl Scouts' 100th anniversary, Skinny Chef Jennifer Iserloh put a slim spin on their popular Samoa. Ours is lower in fat and calories—Scout's honor!

Sometimes we spread jam between the layers; other times we simply dust the cake with powdered sugar.

This chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting gets a generous (and fun!) garnish of chopped chocolate and peanuts.

Crunchy edges and soft centers make Lahey's cookies a classic.

Although this dish takes almost three hours to make, I promise you it’s so worth it. The short ribs become incredibly tender and moist, they fall off the bone. It’s the kind of meal you will dream about on a snowy night. The twist here is the shaved bittersweet chocolate, which gives the dish a sweet and savory yet extremely subtle component. You can leave it out, but trust me when I tell you that it’s the element everyone will be talking about when they taste this.

Dark chocolate, walnuts, and crystallized ginger combine in these incomparably good biscotti. Chocolate with at least 70 percent cocoa helps keep them rich but not too sweet.

Petite and buttery-tasting, Forelle pears are ideal for dunking in chocolate, although any type of pear will be delicious, from a plump Bartlett to an elegant Bosc. Although it should be eaten in moderation, dark chocolate (with at least 70 percent cocoa) contains flavonoids that help lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease.

Native to North America, turkey has always been a celebratory bird (or at least it was celebrated by those who dined on it). Turkey (guajolote, in Spanish) was used for special feasts in pre-Columbian times and was a favorite food of the American Indians. In Mexico today, turkey in mole is still the preferred holiday dish. For Thanksgiving dinner one year at Coyote Café, we raised almost thirty wild turkeys (so much better than the modern domesticated turkey) on open ranchland so they were free to go anywhere and eat anything. The flavor of those turkeys was magnificent! This recipe is a tempting taste of what awaits any traveler to Oaxaca or Puebla, two of the great Mexican mole capitals. Commercially produced mole sauces are widely available throughout most major grocery store chains in the United States. We have used turkey breast for this recipe, but any part of the turkey will work. Note that the turkey must marinate overnight before cooking.

Chocolate soufflé, with its chewy exterior and warm, puddinglike center, might be considered the more refined cousin of molten chocolate cake. With or without a sauce of Crème Anglaise (basically the ice-cream base on page 468 before it’s frozen), a soufflé is a showstopper. And although it has earned a reputation for difficulty, following a few key techniques will reward you with a masterpiece every time. Before whipping the egg whites, be sure your bowl and whisk are thoroughly clean and dry; just a drop of grease, yolk, or water will prevent the whites from expanding properly. Avoid overbeating the egg whites; you’ve taken them too far if they lose their glossiness and become clumpy. Above all else, don’t open the oven door until the end of the baking time, since any fluctuation in temperature, as well as an accidentally slammed oven door, can cause a soufflé to fall. This recipe will produce the best results when baked in five 10-ounce ramekins; you can divide the batter among six dishes, but the soufflés won’t reach the same height as those shown here (though they will be just as delicious).

Everyone needs one reliable recipe for an old-fashioned drop cookie. This master recipe fills the bill. It’s simple (no machines necessary—the butter can be creamed by hand, though you can use a mixer for ease) and infinitely variable (modify the dough with any of the add-ins listed below, or split it into two or three batches so that you can make more than one type of cookie at the same time). And if you want, you can bake a portion of it, then form the remainder into balls (on baking sheets) and place in freezer until frozen. Store the frozen balls of dough in a resealable bag in the freezer until until you’re ready to bake; let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes before baking, and bake a few minutes longer than the recommended time. These cookies are somewhat cakey; for a chewier texture, reduce the flour by 1/2 cup and the baking time by 2 minutes.

Cannoli are one of the most widely known Italian desserts in this country, so naturally I wanted to find a way to include them in our repertoire. Traditional cannoli are tubes of fried pastry filled with ricotta cheese, and, often, bits of chocolate or dried fruit. When made right and served when the shells are still crisp, cannoli can be delicious, and when Dahlia came up with the idea of stuffing the shells with gelato, I knew she’d hit on something even better. They’re like little elegant ice cream cones where you get crunchy cone in every bite. We serve them three to a plate, each filled with a different gelato, with complementary dessert sauces and chopped nuts. Serving this kind of selection would be extremely challenging to do at home, but even one flavor of gelato and one type of dessert sauce will still make a really special presentation and a delicious dessert. The cannoli dough makes enough for four servings, but the dessert sauce our gelati and sorbetti recipes make are enough for exponentially more cannoli. So to serve a crowd, just double or quadruple the dough recipe. You will need a 3-inch square cookie cutter (preferably fluted) and small cannoli forms to make these. To get away with buying fewer forms, you can fry the cannoli shells in batches.

Stracciatella comes from the verb stracciare, which means “to tear apart.” Italians use the word for several foods, including the inside of burrata cheese, a soup in which the egg is dropped into hot broth, and this gelato, which consists of plain gelato, known as “fior di latte,” or “flower of milk,” with dark chocolate “shreds” strewn throughout. Ariana Flores, the assistant pastry chef for both restaurants, is always happy when this flavor goes back into rotation. It’s her favorite to eat, but I also think she likes the process of drizzling the chocolate over the ice cream to make the shreds. I love how plain stracciatella is—that it’s basically just milk, without even egg yolks or vanilla, which American chocolate chip ice cream generally contains—and I like the bright white color of it. If you want to make fior di latte, an Italian classic, simply omit the chocolate portion of this recipe. I especially like it topped with toasted pine nuts (page 63).

This deep, dark chocolate sorbetto is so rich and thick, it’s hard to believe there is no dairy in it. There is so much chocolate in it that, while it’s smooth and delicious straight out of the maker, if you let it sit in the freezer for more than an hour or so, it becomes so hard you’d have to use a chisel to get a bite. Cacao nibs are the dry, toasted pieces of cacao beans left after the husks have been removed. I like them for the crunch and the bitter cocoa flavor they add. Cacao nibs are available in the baking section of specialty markets and from online sources, but if you can’t find them, your sorbetto will still be good plain and smooth.

Since we offer only one chocolate cookie on our assorted cookie plate, we made sure that cookie is as chocolatey as possible. We call them maltagliati, which means “badly cut.” In truth, the dough is not cut at all; the pieces are torn from a slab of chilled dough. In any case, the cookies are sure to please any dark-chocolate lover.

Raspberry jam is the core of these delightful candies.

Apricot and chocolate is a superb combination of flavors. This fruit confection makes an attractive presentation.