Hey everyone, thanks for entering the Amano chocolate giveaway! I enjoyed reading your responses, especially all the nice things you’re planning to do.  The winner is…Ling Ling.  Congratulations!  The chocolate’s in the mail.

Photo: Amano Chocolate

If you only associate American chocolate with gritty Hershey’s bars, you’re in for a big surprise. One of my favorite chocolates in the WORLD is made on a mountain top in Orem, Utah. When Amano debuted two years ago, they only made 70% chocolate, but the bars differed radically because of where the cacao was grown.

Now Amano is making “dark” milk chocolate. This is not your mother’s candy bar. In the U.S., milk chocolate only needs a minimum of 10% cacao solids; Amano’s is 30%. As a result, you have the creaminess of milk chocolate and the complexity of dark.

Amano’s really nice PR lady is offering three of their newest bars for free. You can win the limited edition 70% Montanya (notes of grass, apricot kernels and toasted marshmallows), 30% Ocumare (notes of coffee and peaches), and 30% Jembrana. All together, they’re worth $22.

To enter the giveaway, please pay it forward: promise to do a good deed (we’re working with the honor system here) and tell me what kind of chocolate you crave most (milk, dark, or white) in the comments below. Contest ends Fri., Oct. 30 at 9:00 PM EST, just in time for Halloween!

Related links:
How to judge chocolate based on its origin
First impressions of Amano
Amano website

While it’s good to cut down on animal products for the environment (think of how many people you could feed with 14 trillion gallons of water, instead of giving it the cows), it’s also hard to refuse a buttery chocolate chip cookie.  Vegan dessert options aren’t good; most taste and look like Birkenstocks.  Ironically, some are junkier than their regular counterparts.  I’ll take butter over Crisco any day.

Liz Lovely is an exception.  They only use fair trade, organic, and natural products: flour, sugar, Spectrum sustainable palm oil, baking soda, and your typical flavorings (chocolate, peanut butter, ginger).  They make some of my favorite cookies, vegan or not.  They practice what they preach too; they ship the cookies with biodegradable corn “peanuts.”  These aren’t the corn forks that actually fill up landfills; they dissolve in water.

The nice folks at Liz Lovely sent me a three-pack sample, and the Chocolate Moose Dragons are my favorite. Unless you make flourless chocolate cookies, you can’t get much richer than this.  The chocolate chunks are top notch.  I didn’t care for the spiciness of the Ginger Snapdragons, and it was heavy on the baking powder taste.  Although I fantasize about raw cookie dough, the Cowgirl Cookies showed me that too much of a good thing is just too much (but I bet the dough would go well with vanilla ice cream).

Just be careful with these cookies.  Each bag comes with two cookies the size of your hand.  While the package brags that you can share it with a friend, you won’t want to. But you should, because each cookie contains two servings.  Liz Lovely’s mission is to do good, but I hereby declare their cookies evil because they ruined my dinner…and breakfast.

They might ruin your appetite too, if you win a sampler containing two each of the Chocolate Moose Dragons, Snicker Dudes, Goats a’ Grazin’, and Macaroonies Sock-It-To-Me!  To enter, please promise to do a good deed and give me your best vegan dessert recipe (either write it in or provide a link) in the comments below.  No recipes with trans fatty shortening please.  The entry with most delicious sounding recipe will win.  Contest ends Sun., July 13 at 5:00 PM EST.

Congratulations to Niko of Dessert Buzz for winning a free galley of CakeLove!  While most people love cake because of the frosting, his favorite part is the contrasting textures.  Extra points for originality, but I did pick a random winner.

You may have seen him on the Food Network, and now you can bring him into your kitchen. This week, I’m giving away a bound galley of CakeLove: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch by Warren Brown. To enter, please promise to do a good deed and answer this question in the comments section: What’s to love about cake? The contest ends next Wed., May 28 at 12:00 A.M. EST.

What’s this Pay it Forward Giveaway, you ask? It’s my way of sharing the wealth. I have too many cookbooks, so I’m spending my own money to ship them, as long as you promise to do good, too. If you need ideas, here’s two causes: the Myanmar cyclone and the North Korea concentration camps.

Even before the cyclone, the military regime kept the rightful president, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest. Myanmar’s also the world’s second-largest producer of opium. Now, the government is stealing aid and giving out spoiled food. While the victims starve, rice is being exported. If you donate to the victims, please make sure the aid actually gets to them. World Vision reports that it has complete control over emergency supplies.

Up until two weeks ago, the only thing I knew about North Korea’s sketchy history was its nuclear weapons. It’s only a shadow of a bigger problem: concentration camps that rival Auschwitz. Citizens (and the next three generations of their family) go there for upsetting the government in the smallest way. A lot of aid ends up on the black market in China, so I don’t think it’s necessarily wise to donate. I can only think of educating people and praying about it.