Mocha Pudding Cake

Chocolate pudding cakes are the quick-fix way to make a molten chocolate cake. They’re cakes that bake into two layers in the oven all on their own – a light cake and a rich chocolate sauce.  Coffee is a great way to boost the flavor of chocolate and make it seem more intense, so it’s usually a great addition to a chocolate dessert. In the case of this cake, there is so much coffee that the whole dessert takes on a mocha flavor.

The pudding is smooth and chocolaty, with a consistency somewhere between warm pudding and chocolate sauce. It adds a lot of moisture to the chocolate cake layer, which is fairly thin, but provides the perfect amount of cake to go with the sauce. The dessert is easy to make and is a great way to use up the coffee still in the pot after you’ve already had a cup or two.

If you don’t want so much mocha, you can always opt for a regular chocolate pudding cake, instead.

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Ritter Sport Cappuccino, reviewed

Ritter Sport is a brand of German candy bars that is great for those who like a lot of variety in their chocolate, as their bars are consistently excellent and come in all kinds of flavors.

The Ritter Sport Cappuccino, like their other chocolates, is a square milk chocolate bar made up of smaller squares., each of which has a cappuccino-flavored filling. The filling is like a very dense mousse, light on the tongue but easy to bite into. It has a great coffee flavor, very much like a real cappuccino with notes of fresh coffee and milk. The milk chocolate is very creamy and the whole thing just melts smoothly into your mouth, coming very close to the flavor of a very well-made mocha latte in the end. This is a very rich bar that is definitely satisfying on the chocolate end and the coffee side of things.

Homemade Espresso Truffle Latte

One of the holiday offerings at Starbucks is a mocha that is a spinoff of their new Signature Hot Chocolate: the Espresso Truffle. It’s the hot chocolate combined with a shot or two of espresso. The hot chocolate alone is much richer tasting than the chocolate syrup they use for their regular mochas, and I recreated that feeling for this homemade version by adding melted chocolate to regular hot cocoa mix. The extra cocoa butter from the chocolate makes the drink creamier and more chocolaty, without just tasting like you dumped too much hot chocolate mix (and sugar) into your cup. You can either use a shot of espresso to finish of your drink, or use a little less milk and substitute strong coffee.

It makes a delicious – and fairly decadent – drink for a fraction of the cost of going to a coffee shop and not much more effort than you would use when adding regular milk and sugar to coffee at home.

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Trader Joe’s Have Your Espresso & Eat It, Too, reviewed

Trader Joe’s got a little cute when it came to putting a name on one of their newest frozen desserts, dubbing it Have Your Espresso & Eat It Too. The name is quite a mouthful for the four single-serving mousses inside the box. The directions say to simply defrost and serve for “intense espresso mousse atop  layer of very chocolate mousse.”

Right off the bat, these get an A+ for presentation. Each layered mousse is in an aysemmetrical shot glass that looks like something you might be served at an upscale restaurant (though the cups are plastic, not glass). Each mousse is topped with a chocolate covered espresso bean and a dusting of cocoa powder. The espresso mousse is delicious, with a really nice, light coffee flavor and the consistency of a cloud. The chocolate mousse is quite heavy and has a slightly grainy texture to it, even after a very long defrost. It is more dominant than the espresso, but the overall combination is not bad. That said, I could eat a whole container of the espresso and wouldn’t miss the chocolate one bit – as long as I still got the chocolate covered bean on top.

Speaking of defrosting, I found the defrost directions on the package to be misleading. The mousses were still icy after hours in the fridge and were definitely best when defrosted completely at room temperature (70F in my kitchen) for about an hour after taking them out of the freezer.

Tim Tam Slam How-To

One of my very favorite cookies is the Tim Tam, an exceptionally popular Australian cookie that consists of a chocolate mousse sandwiched between two chocolate wafer biscuits and dunked in a thin layer of chocolate. The cookies come in all kinds of flavors – from mint to caramel to dulce de leche – but the overall structure remains the same. These cookies have just become available in the US (previously only available at $$ import stores) thanks to a new release from Pepperidge Farms.

The best thing to do with a Tim Tam is the Tim Tam Slam – and now that we can access them here in the US on a regular basis, it’s a good skill to learn because it is the absolute best way to enjoy a Tim Tam. All you do is bite off opposite corners of the cookie, then insert one end into a cup of hot coffee and suck the coffee up through the cookie. The hot liquid travels up through the filling – creating a mouthful of mocha – and soaks up into the biscuits, while the chocolate holds everything together. It’s good for one big sip, then you need to eat the cookie quickly before it falls apart in your hand, instead of your mouth.

Pretty close to heaven in one bite.