When you stick to a holiday’s “theme” colors - red and green for Christmas, pink and red for Valentine’s Day - it makes it much easier to come up with treats to make in celebration. These Red, White and Blue Chocolate Dipped Strawberries incorporate both the colors of the 4th of July holiday and fresh, in-season strawberries. They look extremely patriotic, as far as strawberries go, and taste like summer.

Just like any other chocolate-dipped strawberries, the method for making these is very easy. There is only one additional step: dip the tips of the strawberries into some blue sprinkles or blue sanding sugar once they have been dipped into the chocolate. Blue sprinkles or jimmies have a bold color to them and look cute on the strawberries, but blue sanding sugar, which I used for the strawberries here, gives the berries a little bit of a sparkle. The color of the sprinkles will not stand out well on milk or dark chocolate, and you won’t get the same visual effect as you do with white chocolate. That said, if you really want to incorporate milk or dark chocolate, just double dip the berries first into the chocolate of your choice, let that layer set up, and continue on with the white chocolate and sprinkles.

Store the berries in the refrigerator until you’re ready to eat them, as white chocolate is a little more heat-sensitive than other chocolates. The berries are best within a day or two of being made.
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Ever since I had my first one, sitting in front of a roaring campfire with a semi-clean stick skewered with lots of toasting marshmallows, I have been a big fan of s’mores. If I could go back in time, only thing I’d do differently now is to use a really clean skewer for my marshmallows, but when you’re camping and very young, you don’t tend to think about those things. I still like classic s’mores made with squares of milk chocolate, store bought graham crackers and jet puffed marshmallows. Now that my culinary skills are a little improved, however, I do like to experiment a little bit and see how I can get even more flavor out of my s’mores. Homemade graham crackers and homemade marshmallows are great examples of small changes. A big change is to turn a simple s’more into a S’mores Cake.

You don’t need a campfire for this cake, but you do need an oven. It’s a graham cracker cake, layered with marshmallow creme and milk chocolate frosting. The cake is made with graham cracker crumbs where you might otherwise use all purpose flour, and is leavened with both baking powder and egg whites that have been beaten to soft peaks. The finished cake is light in texture, but has a ton of graham cracker flavor. It is very moist, so it will crack if it isn’t handled with care when you’re stacking up the layers.

The milk chocolate frosting - chosen because the typical s’more uses milk chocolate - is almost like a milk chocolate ganache. It is made with chocolate, half and half and butter. The thing that differentiates it is that I included a little bit of corn syrup, which gives it a shiny look and makes it very easy to work with. The marshmallow creme is just store-bought marshmallow creme. It spreads onto the cake easily and stays nice and soft, making the cake easy to cut and serve.

One final note: a fire pit makes a great backdrop for a photo of a S’mores cake, but the cake really isn’t designed to hold up to heat of any kind. Both the frosting and the marshmallow creme are a little heat-sensitive. Unless it’s a cold day, you can - and should - store this cake in the fridge to keep everything intact. The cake will stay moist and tender even after a couple of days in the fridge. But if you don’t mind a melty, slightly messy cake that is like a real s’more, than by all means, go for the fire.

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These Chocolate-Dipped Ice Cream Cream Puffs pretty much explain themselves. They’re cream puffs that are filled with ice cream and dipped in chocolate. The cream puffs themselves are not hard to make, but they look so cute when they’re done, that these simple frozen treats look pretty impressive. If you’ve made cream puffs before, you’ll know that they come out of them oven a little crisp on the outside. The cream puffs loose a little bit of their just-baked crispiness when frozen, but these are such a tasty treat to pull out of the freezer that it just doesn’t matter.

I dip these in chocolate before I freeze them, making the chocolate shell nice and crunchy when I’m ready to eat. This also makes eating the cream puffs a pretty non-messy affair, even considering the prospect of the ice cream melting if you eat too slowly. To make the dessert a little more interactive, you can serve undipped cream puffs with melted chocolate (i.e. fondue-style) or with some fudge sauce and let your family and friends dip to their hearts’ content.

These will keep in the freezer for at least a couple of weeks and can be made with any kind of ice cream you like. The recipe below makes smaller, easy-to-hold cream puffs. If you want to go big, double the size of each ball of dough and double the baking time.
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Yogurt can be a great, no fuss base for souffles. This is particularly true of thick Greek-style yogurt, as it provides a lot of body to the base of a souffle recipe. One of my favorite souffles that features yogurt is my Yogurt Cheesecake Souffles, as they have a fluffy texture but a rich cheesecake-like flavor in spite of the fact that they include no cream cheese in the recipe. The souffle itself is only mildly flavored, and I made a little variation on it by adding some Nutella to the souffle base.

The souffle has a taste and texture that is very similar to a mousse, although it is served piping hot shortly after it emerges from the oven. It has a relatively subtle Nutella flavor when compared to eating a spoonful of the stuff straight out of the jar, but the clear hazelnut and chocolate notes come through well and make the souffle both airy and tasty. The tang of the yogurt, as well as the fact that there just isn’t that much sugar in this recipe to begin with, keeps things from getting too sweet. It’s a great dessert to end a meal - even a big one - thanks to its lightness. Plus, it only takes a couple of minutes to mix up the base and pop it into to bake.

The souffles will rise up impressively in the oven (see photo below) and are pretty stable, so while they will deflate and sink down slightly into the ramekins as they cool off (see photo above), you don’t have to worry about them being so fragile that they’ll collapse with a puff of air. As I said before, Greek-style yogurt works the best for this recipe, as “regular” yogurt can be a little bit on the thin side. Any fat content will work, and you should be able to find Greek-style yogurt in most grocery stores. If you can’t, drain some plain yogurt over a cheesecloth for 15-30 minutes to allow some of the excess moisture to drain out and leave behind a thicker, more cheese-like, yogurt.
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Applesauce is a slightly misunderstood ingredient in baking these days. It is often described as a “fat replacer” when it is no such thing. Applesauce is a semi-solid ingredient (basically a liquid, since it doesn’t fall into the dry ingredient category) that can add moisture to some types of baked goods. It helps out in lower fat treats because it can prevent, or at least mitigate, dryness, and it has a very mild flavor so it usually isn’t very noticeable. By itself, it doesn’t tenderize baked goods like oil and butter do, so recipes where people have gone overboard with the substitution of fat for applesauce often turn out gummy and sticky.

This isn’t to say that applesauce doesn’t have a place in baking. The way that it adds moisture is not just because of the apple juice portion of the sauce. It comes from all those little bits of apple that spread out in a cake or cookie dough and release moisture over time. This can actually help keep a baked good fresh-tasting, if you don’t go overboard with it. This Applesauce Chocolate Layer Cake is a perfect example of a good use of applesauce. It doesn’t “replace” anything in this recipe, it just serves its own purpose. The applesauce is used as the main liquid in the recipe, where other cakes might use milk or sour cream, and it works out beautifully. It also helps to making the cake a good choice for those who prefer their cakes to be dairy-free. This recipe comes from the LCBO magazine and is available online, although my copy was thoughtfully clipped out and mailed to me by a chocolate cake-loving friend.

This cake is moist and fluffy, with a very good chocolate flavor - more dark chocolate than milk chocolate. The unsweetened applesauce and unsweetened cocoa powder keep the cake from being too sweet, in spite of the fact that there is a fair amount of sugar in it (less than some chocolate cakes I’ve made, however). The fluffiness comes from the applesauce and from the fact that the egg whites are separated, beaten to soft peaks and folded into the batter. You can use any kind of frosting you like for this cake. Chocolate frosting is good if you’re trying to please a crowd of chocolate lovers, and vanilla is good for contrast. If you want to stick with the dairy-free aspect, use a meringue or marshmallow-based frosting.

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The best thing about baking a batch of cookies with macadamia nuts in them, like White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies or Macadamia Oatmeal Lace Cookies, is that you’re left with a bunch of macadamia nuts to use up in other recipes. Macadamia nuts can be kind of pricey, so they’re not necessarily something I keep on hand all the time, but their buttery flavor and crunch go so well with so many dishes, I really enjoy having them around the kitchen to use here and there.

Sometimes I use chopped macadamia nuts as an ice cream topping, standing in for the peanuts often used in a hot fudge sundae, and here I used them to finish off some strawberries I dipped in milk chocolate.

You don’t really need a recipe to make these, especially if you don’t mind having some extra strawberries, chocolate and macadamia nuts around. You can just eyeball it (or look below for some estimates). Melt some chocolate, dip as many berries as you can, then sprinkle the berries with (or dip them into) coarsely chopped nuts. The flavor of the macadamias goes very well with the milk chocolate and really makes the otherwise simple treat into something a little bit more special.

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