"decadent" news and stories

Santos, at the Scent of Green Bananas, has come up with the perfect way to decorate a chocolate cake for Valentine's Day: more chocolate. This decadent, mini heart-shaped cake is topped with small individual candies, leaving some wrapped to provide a beautiful color contrast. To recreate the Candy Box Cake at home, you can use any chocolate cake recipe - including a box mix - and frost it with chocolate icing. Don't worry if your icing job is not quite perfect, because once the cake is completely frosted, cover the top with your favorite chocolate candies. If a full sized cake is more than you want to bake, you can apply the same candy-decorating technique to frosted cupcakes.

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Columnist Tim Dowling of the Guardian undertook the challenge of making a Snickers Pie, also known as the unhealthiest recipe ever, to see how it tasted. According to the comments from our last post, many readers think that the pie should taste fantastic - an opinion based solely upon the fat and calorie content of the dessert. Mr. Dowling's article supports the fact that this is not always the case. The dessert, which baked into something of a cross between a quiche and a souffle, was not more than the sum of its parts. In fact, he said that not only did the Snickers bars not improve after 30 minutes in a hot oven, but "quite apart from anything else, it has peanuts in it." Chunks of nuts in a melting, not quite homogenous mixture just doesn't seem to work as well as the endorsers of ultra-decadent desserts would have liked to believe - even with a high fat and calorie content.

[Thanks to Mark for the tip]

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Starbucks is discontinuing the ultra-rich drinking chocolate, Chantico, this month. The drink was released last January to generally good reviews on its appearance and creamy taste. With 390 calories and 21 grams of fat per 6-ounce serving, it received more than a few negative reviews from nutritionists, who tried to steer people away from it. It seems unlikely that the nutritional information was keeping its popularity in check, particularly since there are very popular drinks, like a Tall White Chocolate Mocha (12 ounces) that have an equal amount of calories and fat per serving. It is more likely that Chantico was promoted as too much of a “special occasion” drink to become a menu staple, like mocha lattes and cappuccinos. It probably would have fared better as a seasonal offering.

Stores will be selling their remaining stock, so if you want to get in one last taste of Chantico, do it soon.

If you didn't indulge enough over the holidays, you might want to plan a dinner at a local Claim Jumper restaurant. The Southern California-based chain offers a dessert that will stop chocolate-lovers and cardiologists in their tacks: the Chocolate Motherlode Cake. Standing nearly 12-inchs high, the dessert is six layers of dense, rich chocolate cake slathered in thick, fudgy frosting studded with a generous number of walnuts. One slice of the cake, which is cut into 10 servings, weighs 3 pounds. Each year the company sells more than a quarter of a million slices of cake in its restaurants, while whole cakes are purchased for everything from office parties to weddings.

For anyone who is watching their calories in the new year, you may want to pass on this dessert. Claim Jumper doesn't offer the nutritional information for most of their foods, but they sell a 5-ounce version of their chocolate motherlode cake. Since the real thing is almost 10 times the size of the frozen one, assuming that they have the same or a similar recipe, a restaurant-sized slice of this dessert will have well over 4000 calories.