Anyone who makes something as delicious as chocolate is bound to be the most popular person on the block. Not so with Shawn Askinosie. During his former life as a criminal defense attorney, he received death threats. When he had an epiphany to make high-quality chocolate (it was either that or cupcakes) in 2005, he alienated both the chocolate and law community. Robert Steinberg, co-founder of Scharffen Berger chocolate, was unimpressed with Shawn’s science background: a lone forestry class from the University of Missouri. His colleagues thought he was crazy, running back and forth from the courtroom to the factory. When Shawn was needed at “work,” he donned the emergency suit he kept in the factory and wiped the brown stains off his face.

Fortunately for chocolate lovers like us, Shawn opened his Springfield factory this January. This is a big deal because there are very few chocolate makers in the world. Most companies who sell chocolate don’t actually make it themselves. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Chocolate making is a 70-step process.

If you grew up on Hershey’s bars, you might think, “How good can American chocolate be?” When American chocolate is bad, it’s grainy, sour and artificial tasting. But when American chocolate is good, it’s among the best in the world. Some of my favorite brands, like Dagoba, Theo and Amano, are American. Askinosie is a worthy contender.

Pure chocolate is only pure cacao solids, added cocoa butter for smoothness, sugar, an emulsifier like soy lecithin (to keep everything together) and vanilla. A few chocolate makers exclude the soy lecithin or vanilla in the name of purity. I think the chocolate usually suffers as a result (for example, Michel Cluizel is crumbly without the emulsifier and Chocovic is flat without the vanilla), but it’s a commendable effort and a sign that the brand is serious about its chocolate.

Askinosie’s single-origin bars don’t have vanilla or soy lecithin, a double whammy. When I tasted the free sample that Shawn shipped me, I couldn’t tell that anything was missing. The bars were exceptionally smooth, glossy and had strong flavors.

For all you chocolate nerds, Askinosie is also unique because it makes single-origin cocoa butter and nibs. When other companies add cocoa butter to their chocolate, they use whatever’s available. The problem is that the two cocoa butters can result in waxy chocolate.

For all his meticulousness, it comes as no surprise that Shawn buys cacao directly from the farmers for more than market value (most cacao farmers live in poverty). Each bar also comes with a map detailing the region and the farmer. The bars also come with individual Choc-O-Lot numbers, so you can trace their journey.

Askinosie is dedicated to sustainability: the tie on top of the bar comes from cocoa bean sacks, and the inner wrapping is compostable.

The 70% San Jose del Tambo bar from Ecuador has a unique tart red fruit and maple flavor. Ecuador is known for mild, nutty tasting beans, so these flavors were unexpected. The 75% Soncusco bar from Mexico is even better. It’s so unusual that I’m at a loss for words, but I guess it’s like grass, hay and dirt. Although Mexico is the home of spiced hot chocolate and mole, I don’t know of any other artisan bar from there. I guess something got lost in that 70-step process.

In short, Askinosie’s chocolate is impressive but not quite one of my favorites. Part of it is a bias on the flavor. While it’s strong, it’s not what I’m used to. Also, at $40 a pound, it’s expensive. As a point of reference, Valrhona, one of the gold standards, is $15 a pound. Is Askinosie worth that much, when it leaves a slightly scratchy feel in the back of my throat and could have a fuller range of flavors? I’m not sure, but it’s  worth a try.

Askinosie Chocolate
514 E. Commercial, Springfield, MO 65803
phone: 417-862-9900
fax: 862-9904

Chocolate is available at their factory (adult tours are $3!), their website and stores in Alaska, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida, Oregon, New Mexico, Missouri, Philadelphia and Texas.

During fall in New York, the air gets refreshingly crisp, just like the season’s apples. You know the CRUNCH you hear in the Washington Apple commercials? It’s so loud that it sounds fake, but it’s exactly how good apples are over here.

On this first day of fall, my friends and I went apple picking (we city folk are easily entertained). Here’s a recipe to put the season’s bounty to use. It’s the only 100% whole wheat cake worthy to be called dessert. Instead of being thrown in for the sake of being whole grain, the whole wheat lends an extra earthiness to the fruit. The flour’s bitterness is offset with boiled cider. (King Arthur’s Whole Grain Baking says that any acid, such as orange juice, masks whole wheat’s bitterness. You only need to add a little, and you won’t taste the oranges.) While this cake is high in fiber, it’s by no means low fat. The deep, caramel flavor is lovely, so you skip the frosting it if you like.

Legacy Apple Cake (adapted from King Arthur Whole Grain Baking)

Makes 1 rectangular or 9-inch round cake

Cake:

Butter (for greasing the pan)
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (traditional or white whole wheat), plus more for the pan
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice, or 2 teaspoons apple pie spice
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup boiled cider or apple juice concentrate
3 apples, peeled, seeded, and chopped or 1 1/3 cup applesauce
1 cup toasted walnuts, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-by-13-inch square pan or a 9-inch round pan.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice or apple pie spice; set aside.
3. Using an electric mixer in a large mixing bowl, cream the butter with the brown and granulated sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, stopping between each addition to scrape the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl. Beat in vanilla, cider (or apple juice) and the applesauce (if using).
4. With the mixer set on low speed, beat in the flour mixture until evenly moistened.
5. Toss the walnuts and apples (if using) with 1 teaspoon of the flour mixture. This step ensures that the chunks don’t sink to the bottom of the cake.
6. With a rubber spatula, fold the apples (if using) and walnuts into the cake batter.
7. Spread the batter in the prepared pan. Bake for 45-60 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. The round cake pan will take closer to 60 minutes.
8. Remove the cake from the oven and set on a wire rack to cool.

Frosting:

Double this recipe if frosting a double layer cake

5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. In a small pan over medium heat, melt the butter. Stir in brown sugar and salt. Cook, stirring, until the sugar melts. Add the milk, bring to a boil, and pour into a mixing bowl. Cool for 10 minutes.
2. Stir in confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Beat well; if the mixture seems too thin, add more confectioners’ sugar. Use the frosting while it is still warm.

To serve:

Frost the cake. If you are making a round layer cake, level the cake with a large serrated knife. Then cut the cake into two even layers. If only it were that easy, right? The norm is to saw the knife back and forth into the cake. I always get raggedy edges with lots of crumbs.

Baker Linda Dann taught me an easier way. If you are right handed, hold your cutting arm against your body. With knife in hand, bend your forearm so it’s parallel to the cake. Steadily place your free left hand on top of the cake and turn it counter-clockwise into the knife. Don’t move your cutting hand. Keep pushing/rotating the cake into the knife, and you’ll get a clean cut. If you are left handed, switch the hands and rotate the cake clockwise.

Notes:

Boiled cider is simply apple cider that’s been concentrated till it’s thick and syrupy. To make it, reduce 1 1/2 cups of regular cider in an uncovered pot till you have 1/4 cup. I think this took me half an hour.

For a reduced fat version, replace 1/2 stick of butter with 1/4 cup of applesauce. Add the applesauce with the cider.

If you are a food blogger, I can almost guarantee that this insidious person has ripped off your posts. This person has no original content but only copies hundreds of posts (and steals bandwidth) without giving credit. At least three of my entries have appeared word for word on this site. Some prominent victims include Martha Stewart, David Lebovitz, Yum Sugar and Delicious Days. I notified Blogger, and they’re still looking into it.

If your site is being copied, here’s what you can do (via Google’s copyright guidelines).

1.Identify in sufficient detail the copyrighted work that you believe has been infringed upon. This post must include identification of the specific posts, as opposed to entire sites. Posts must be referenced by the permalink of the post. For example, “The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on http://johndoe.com/test/2006_01_01.html#2106.

2. Identify the material that you claim is infringing the copyrighted work listed in item #1 above.

YOU MUST IDENTIFY EACH POST BY PERMALINK OR DATE THAT ALLEGEDLY CONTAINS THE INFRINGING MATERIAL. The permalink for a post is usually found by clicking on the timestamp of the post. For example, “The blog where my copyrighted work is published on is http://copyright.blogspot.com/archives/2006_01_02_example.html.”

3. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred).

4. Include the following statement: “I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”.

5. Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

6. Sign the paper.

7. Send the written communication to the following address:

Google, Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support, Blogger DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

OR fax to:

(650) 618-2680, Attn: Blogger Legal Support, DMCA Complaints

Poor cottage cheese is the butt of all jokes (no pun intended). It’s seen as tasteless diet food, yet no one wants to be called “cottage cheese thighs.” Maida Heatter’s Book of Great American Desserts should have changed all that. She discovered that puréed cottage cheese becomes as smooth and elegant as sour cream.

In Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts, Alice Medrich makes sublime tiramisù and cheesecake with “Maida’s Cream.” I don’t even bother with the full-fat versions anymore. Since puréed cottage cheese can stand in for mascarpone cheese, cream cheese and sour cream, I wondered if its richness could translate to ice cream.

Since simple is often best, I substituted the puréed cheese for the strained yogurt in David Lebovitz’s plain frozen yogurt recipe. I added some oil (since cottage cheese is lean) and a splash of vodka to keep it scoopable. The end result was pure tasting and luscious. It’s less tart than plain frozen yogurt, so it’s more amenable to add-ins, like chocolate.

It’s best eaten two hours after it’s made, or else it gets rock hard. There’s a couple ways to remedy this issue: use more sugar, prepare a custard base (try substituting 2 cups of puréed cottage cheese for the cream) or let the cold ice cream sit on your counter for 15 minutes.

Cottage Cheese Ice Cream

Recipe based on techniques from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great American Desserts, The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz and The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

3 cups (681 g) 1% low-fat, no salt added cottage cheese
3/4 to 1 cup (150 to 200g) sugar, depending on your sweet tooth
1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
1 1/2 Tbsp oil
1 1/2 Tbsp vodka

1. In a food processor or blender, combine all ingredients and blend for 3-5 minutes, being sure to scrape down the sides with a spatula a couple times. It’s important not to cheat on the processing time, or else the cheese won’t get perfectly smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Harden it in the freezer for a couple hours, and then eat it all!

Variation: To make fruit-swirled ice cream, have ready 1/4 cup of your favorite preserves. After the ice cream is done churning, drop a tablespoon of preserves to the bottom of the storage container. Drop spoonfuls of preserves between layers of ice cream. Don’t stir too much, or you’ll lose the swirls.

Note: Try to get cottage cheese without additives, like gums or starches. I like the no-salt added variety, or else it’s too salty for dessert (do you really need 15% of your daily sodium in one serving?). The shorter the ingredient list, the better. Friendship makes great tasting, all-natural cottage cheese, although the curds are too firm to get perfectly smooth.

Don’t you hate it when cookbooks, magazines and blogs have lovely pictures of food that you can’t make at home? I assure you, not everything I make is pretty or delicious. I only reserve the best recipes for this blog, but now I’ll take you into my mishaps through this new column: Don’t try this at home. I won’t post the recipes in the recipe index because they’re so bad, but sometimes you can learn as much from your mistakes as your successes.

A while back, I received a free sample of True Blue blueberry juice. The name implied that it’s 100% pure blueberry juice. It was a great concept and tasted like real berries, but it was made from blueberry and grape juice concentrates, plus added sugar. It might as well been called “reconstituted blueberry-blended cocktail.” The selling point was also the antioxidants, but you have to drink two cups of juice (220 calories) to get the same amount of antioxidants as 1/2 cup of blueberries. No thanks. I’d rather eat a pint of blueberries for the same amount of calories and get the extra fiber. And if I’m thirsty, I’ll just drink water.

Hoping to rid myself of 32 pounds of juice (aren’t you proud that I carried it all to my door?), I boiled down several cups into a concentrated syrup. I wanted to see if it was possible to make sorbet only out of fruit juice. Since sorbets are 25-30% sugar by weight*, and the juice only had 12% sugar, I reduced it over several hours. Then I added a little lime juice to brighten up the flavors. After I froze everything, an unappetizing syrup leached out from the sorbet. It was a tell-tale sign that it had too much sugar. Either my calculations were wrong, or the liquid kept evaporating as it cooled. Also, the sorbet didn’t taste like blueberries anymore. It was astringent and drying, like grape juice. So no, you can’t make sorbet only out of fruit juice, for reasons that I’ll get into later.

While the sorbet sat in my freezer (who wants to eat sticky, fast-melting sorbet?), I made another frozen dessert from Florence Fabricant’s shiso granita recipe in the New York Times. I substituted one bunch of leftover cilantro, since it’s a close cousin of shiso. After I froze it, it looked as appetizing as wheatgrass juice. It tasted like Mexican salsa gone bad. Plus, it wasn’t sweet enough.

Here I had two desserts: one with too much sugar and one with too little. Voila, I combined them and made them semi-edible. I wouldn’t recommend that you do the same though.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t put cilantro in dessert. Ever.
• Don’t boil fruit juice for long periods of time. The delicate flavors will disappear, while the less desirable ones will get stronger.
• If you want to make sorbet out of fruit juice, you need to add sugar rather than boil it to death.
• Liquids evaporate as they cool. If you measure one cup of hot liquid and think, “Perfect! That’s the right amount!” you’ll have considerably less when you actually use it.

*Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Ever since Sept. 1, there’s been a sharp decline of people accessing this site through feed readers (ie Bloglines, Thunderbird). I thought I fixed the problem, but my web stats don’t reflect that. If www.sugoodsweets.com/blog/feed or www.sugoodsweets.com/blog/feed/atom still aren’t working for you, please leave a comment or e-mail me. Or, if they are working, please let me know too.

Summer vacation’s over, so it’s time to get down to business. Baking business, that is. While last year was prevalent with home baking handbooks (in the vein of Baking: From My Home to Yours and Tartine), this year has more niche, sophisticated books. I can’t wait to see these books by the baking super stars.

Warning: with the exception of the first title, I haven’t actually seen these books, so these selections may be skewed.

Chocolate’s first lady is back after four years on hiatus, but this time, she’s giving chocolate a back seat. Pure Dessert devotes each chapter to an artisan ingredient, such as dairy, sugar, grains/nuts/seeds, herbs/spices/flowers, wine, fruit and last but not least, chocolate. These recipes are pared down to the essentials. There’s no frosting or other hullabaloo, just interesting flavor combinations like kamut pound cake and sesame brittle ice cream.

Alice Medrich previously wrote the books on chocolate, including Cocolat, Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts and Bittersweet. She’s tied with Alton Brown for being my biggest culinary inspiration. I’ve made a gazillion of her things, like low-fat chocolate mousse truffles and chocolate-hazelnut cake, with great success.

Release date: Sept. 5.

Ever since I made bagels from the James Beard and IACP award-winning cookbook, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, I’ve been a fan of Peter Reinhart. His new book promises the same artisan type loaves, but with whole grains.

While I was a recipe tester for the book, he was an excellent teacher, even over e-mail. He walked the testers through growing wild yeast with nothing more than flour, water and pineapple juice. Even though I wouldn’t feed some of my early loaves to my enemies, Peter kept encouraging us to continue. After a year of keeping my wild yeast starter, I gave up on it and killed “the beast.” It was a hassle feeding it every couple of days and using the excess for muffins and crumpets.

Luckily by then, Peter developed recipes that used packaged yeast. The final recipes I tested – the 100% whole wheat challah and potato rosemary – were good for whole wheat breads but not as good as white flour breads.

Release date: Aug.

I don’t know of a more inviting cookbook name than Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey. If you’re like me and adore caramel and chocolate sauce, this book looks good. Chocolate caramel-pecan souffle cake, cinnamon-donut bread pudding and double-crumble hot apple pies sound like guilty pleasures.

Release date: Aug. 6.

Mario Batali’s Babbo cookbook had some interesting recipes, like olive oil gelato. Now there’s an entire cookbook devoted to Babbo’s desserts in Dolce Italiano. If you think Italian desserts are just dried out sponge cakes, Gina De Palma shares recipes for sesame-white corn biscotti and Greek yogurt cheesecake with pine nut brittle.

Release date: Oct. 15.

The desserts at Citizen Cake are like traditionalist meets rebel. There’s rocky road cupcakes, passion fruit mousse fillings, and cakes that are carved like geometrical shapes. If you can’t make it to San Francisco, you can make these desserts at home, thanks to Elizabeth Falkner’s Demolition Desserts. She was named Bon Appétit’s Pastry Chef of the Year in 2006 and was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s pastry chef of the year in 2005.

Release date: Oct.

The holidays Life wouldn’t be complete without chocolate. Although there are a million chocolate books out there, they never get old. Marcel Desaulniers, Mr. “Death By Chocolate,” shares holiday desserts in I’m Dreaming of a Chocolate Christmas. Honestly, why can’t chocolate sour cream crumb cake and chocolate-peanut butter ice cream sandwiches be year round?

Release date: Oct. 1.

Sherry Yard, the pastry chef at Spago in Beverly Hills, has probably fed every major celebrity. Whereas her first cookbook, The Secrets of Baking, was a tutorial on master recipes and their variations (ie how to make a ganache and turn it into truffles, hot chocolate and frosting), Desserts by the Yard features sweets that Sherry makes for the stars. There’s even a recipe for Bill Clinton’s favorite oatmeal raisin cookies. Hmm, I wonder what Paris eats.

Release date: Nov. 1.

Carole Walter has written an award-winning series of other “great” cookbooks, including Great Cakes, Great Cookies and Great Pies & Tarts. I felt uncomfortable around her when I assisted in one of her classes, but in all fairness, her recipes are inventive, fool-proof and delicious. Maybe Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More will end my search for the perfect babka.

Release date: Oct. 16.