Oh chocolate mousse, how I love thee.

Actually, let me amend that statement. Oh chocolate, how I love thee.

Here’s one truth about me: I love chocolate. It doesn’t matter what it’s in, I love it.

My latest craving is craving chocolate mousse.

I’m always hunting for the best and tastiest chocolate recipe and both Alice and I were happy with the way this one. For this version, I tweaked a Tyler Florence recipe to make a double serving (because if I’d made the full batch, I would have eaten three servings, and I didn’t need that post-eating guilt).

Check out the recipe!

Recently, Alice told me about some cookies that she had once, never again, but that she would love to try again. As she recalled, they were called flourless chocolate chip cookies. Immediately when she told me this, visions of flourless chocolate cakes danced in my mind (I know, I know, everything isn’t always about chocolate).

However, when she started describing them to me, light, airy, crumbly, only one thing came to mind: meringue. I now knew what I had to do, hunt down a meringue chocolate chip cookie recipe and try it.

For those of you who don’t know, or just care to listen to me blather on about food stuffs (seriously, I can go on and on), a meringue in its simplest form is egg whites beaten until stiff mixed with sugar and then baked until done. Uncooked (I’m not saying you should eat it uncooked, there are a bunch of different places saying that raw eggs aren’t good for you, but I’m a rebel ), this is rather like marshmallow cream.

I did some research, found a few recipes I liked, tweaked them slightly and made some flourless chocolate chip cookies.

Alice seemed like she really liked them, but they weren’t exactly as she remembered them. The texture wasn’t quite right.

With meringue, there’s two ways of cooking it, hot and fast or low and slow. I went with a middle, not quite hot, but warmer and slightly quicker. After she had them and I was able to dissect further how she remembered them being, I’ve determined that the next time I make these, I’m going to go with a higher temp to cook.

If you’re interested in the difference of the two cooking styles, the hotter and quicker you bake meringues, the more crackly and crumbly they’ll be with more of a hollow center. Taking the other method, low and slow, they turn out more soft and fluffy.

Still, I’m happy with the way they turned out, Alice had three before dinner and I think we’ll be trying them again shortly.

Best of all, for all of you who like such things, these are 100% fat free! I mean, fat free chocolate chip cookies that taste good, really, how can you go wrong?

Yesterday we had the first official hot chocolate of the season.

It’s been cooler here in LA (highs in the upper 60s, practically arctic for this area) and yesterday was the tipping point for me. Alice had been talking about how she hadn’t been able to get warm all day, so I knew what I must do: hot chocolate.

Nothing warms you up in the same tasty, yummy kind of fashion like hot chocolate.

Plus, Alice had yet to have my hot chocolate. Since I’m a chocoholic (seriously, I read a Danish study [of course it was Danish] talking about the benefits of 6ozs of dark chocolate a day and knew that I’d been on the right track all along), I’ve always been particular about my hot chocolate. I’m never fully happy when I buy it somewhere, but I’ll always get it because I love it.

After work when I went to the grocery store, I picked up a few food items for the week and some milk for the hot chocolate — you can try to use something other than whole milk, but it won’t turn out quite as tasty.

When Alice came home, after we had dinner (some very tasty fried rice that she made), I fixed us some hot chocolate.

I used two different chocolates for their complexity, whole milk, cream and a few other things — healthy and delicious. When I gave it to Alice, after she had a sip, she said, “I’ve never quite had hot chocolate like this before.” From what I could tell, it wasn’t a, “Eww, I’ve never had anything like this before,” it was a, “Yum, I’ve never had anything like this before!”

Since it was the first of the season, it was the standard plain version. However, soon to come are the variations, cinnamon, cayenne, peppermint (a personal fave of mine) and maybe even a few others.

No matter how you slice it, cold weather demands hot chocolate.

Sadly, it wasn’t until after we had finished drinking it that I realized we weren’t able to take any pictures of it. You know how it is with hot chocolate, once you get it, you don’t want to put it down. I promise, one of the next few times that I make it, I’ll try to remember to takes some pictures to show everyone.

You all just have to promise to go make some yourself. Making stuff at home is both fun and delicious! Plus, you’ll get to control everything that goes into what you’re making.