Hands-on at CHOCOMAZE!

  While we were in Slovakia, we had an amazing opportunity to visit the CHOCOMAZE workshop and try our hands at making some beautiful—and delicious—chocolate treats. CHOCOMAZE is based in Komárno, our sleepy home town in Slovakia. It was founded in 2013 by Katalin Vargha, and while it’s still a small business, it has already received […]

Tangy ice cream with a chocolate wafer ripple

When I was a kid approximately one million years ago, my parents gave me a Donvier ice cream maker. When we moved back to California four years ago, my mom revealed that she had been hanging on to it all this time, and gave it back to us; I promptly put it in the bottom […]

Chocolate spice cake cookies

Right around the time I stopped eating meat as a teenager, I spent a summer working at a local wildlife care clinic. If squeamishness about meat had played any role in my decision to become vegetarian, that would have been the shortest internship ever. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the recipes for […]

Gluten-free pumpkin chocolate chip cake

This isn’t my first waltz with gluten-free baking, but almost. I made some gluten-free cupcakes for a birthday party this summer, and let’s just say that even before I burned them they weren’t exactly winners. It’s a pretty different ball game, this gluten-free stuff. (What, how long do you expect me to sustain a single […]

Chocolate-Coffee Cupcake Parfait

Chocolate-Coffee Cupcake Affogatto

Have we mentioned that Valerian is a coffee freak geek? That we have about five different coffee-making apparatuses in our kitchen, not to mention a microwave-size roaster in the garage? If you follow EC on Facebook, you’ve surely figured it out from Valerian’s profile pictures; coffee looms large around here.