Free Chocolate & Butter!

Who doesn't like Free Chocolate and Butter?

Lake Champlain Chocolates teams up with Vermont Butter and Cheese for a free chocolate and butter tasting, this Saturday, October 24, at 2 p.m. at the LCC 750 Pine Street Factory Store & Cafe. Read The LCC Blog for all the details and more.

Wentworth by the Sea

So very happy to announce that Stephanie Chick, a good friend to the Dessert Dude, has been bestowed a Gold Medal. Truly honored to have known, tasted and been informed of the event. If you'd like to read about it click here for the story.

You can also catch her at Lake George, along with Celebrity Chef Gale Gand at The Sagamore Hotel in Bolton's Landing - aka the Lake George region of New York. TO learn more Click Away!

So much more than Pizza

So I happened upon something that isn't dessert, but certainly is so much more than Pizza. What I'm talking about is Back Country Pizza. They served up some pies and slices at a COTS fundraiser - and I was happy to imbibe.

I partook of a veggie slice with summer squash, zucchini and onion -to name a few. Yummy doesn't begin to describe the experience that started with dough that wasn't your bland stretched gluten. It had interest and intrige. There was texture and nuttiness to it and it was grilled, adding to the flavor.

Well I digress, but keep your eyes on www.7dvt.com for a story about them in he next week or so or just pop over to rebelmarket.blogspot.com for a bit from the horses mouth.

All I can say is it left me wanting more... and I wasn't the only one.

One hump or two

Believe it or not, a company that manufactures Camel's Milk Chocolates is going global. See the complete story here at Reuters. Go the the Al Nassma site if you're ready to buy! I think my favorite is the Chocolate Caravan...

5 minutes to cake?

Well, we've all heard about it - probably saw it on a blog, your friends on facebook may have posted a link, or put it on their status, someone you know has a tweet about it. But, is it any good? Well - I decided I had to find out!

So here's the rundown, you take a mug, toss some flour, sugar, cocoa (mix well) add some oil, milk and an egg and cook for three minutes. Literally five minutes worth of time pass before you pour a 'cake' onto a plate and slice it up.

Find the Recipe, complete with pictures, at Dizzy Dee

So what about the taste? Well, it's about what you would expect from the basic ingredients you add to it! However, it's something I found can be doctored. Here are a few things I've done to help it out. Probably the best one was chocolate sauce. It's ok in milk, it's good on ice cream, but on a hot spongy (ok almost rubbery) cake it soaks in and, man, was it tasty. I also put on some Lake Champlain Chocolates Chips and let them melt in. Yummy. It's also great with some sliced fresh strawberries. Unfortunately I was out of ice cream and whipped cream the other night, and figured the cake would be cold by the time I returned, so I didn't try it with that yet - but I will.

For a five minute dessert, especially one that cooks in the microwave, it's passable, but don't expect any earth shattering stuff to happen. The best thing about it is that you know what's in it and you don't have to put it in any kind of weird metal grid with some odd plastic container and ingredients you wouldn't let your mother in law eat for fear she would turn into some horrible mutant creature - well, more horrible than she already is I mean. Just kidding moms, I love you!

Yummy cupcakes and curry rice crispy treats

If you haven't checked it out yet go to My Little Cupcake VT. Margherita, banana and neopolitan dynamite. Tiny, delicious cupcakes. And if you want a grown up treat try putting curry, sunflower and marshmallows in your rice crispier treats. A very yummy grown up treat. Pictures are here!

Sometimes the best things don't require a spoon

Today my dessert is a beautiful summer day, sipping iced coffee, lazily seated on gorgeous Church Street in Downtown Burlington, Vermont. The smell of the street vendors wafting, the sounds of the musicians singing sleepily makes it's way to me and the ladies walk by in their summer clothes while babies, puppies and even the adults play. And life is good.

Free Ice Cream!

Get yourself out on Saturday for Free Flipped Out flavors. Ben & Jerry's - Saturday, May 30, 2009 from 11:00am - 3:00pm at City Hall Park on Main Street in Burlington, VT. The only link to this event I could find is here on Facebook.

New and Exciting

Well, new and exciting things are on the way. Literally - I've ordered some Desserts from bakers and have a few reviews of more basic things - like the difference between the New and Old style packages of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups I found at a store recently, and (of course) Chocolate!


It's all on the way in the next few weeks, and in the next few days I'll be telling you my experience, and some experiments with something that I made in mere minutes. Will it really fit the bill as a dessert you'll want to eat? We'll see!

Free always tatses best!

Hello friends, as I continue to plan out the next installments of desserts I'm reviewing (ie, I'm waiting on the nice commission check that I've been working on so I can actualy go out and buy all these things) I've started receiving all those nice emails from friends about the free events going on around town. So here goes:

Healthy Living is having a free Wine Tasting tomorrow April 24th from 2-6pm. Just stop in, try some wine and toss around your best sommelier terms with Thomas Houseman - he's a winemaker for Anne Amie Vineyards, located in the rolling hills of Oregon’s verdant Willamette Valley. Healthy Living will be previewing some of thespectacular wines to be featured at NECI's Winemaker Dinner on Saturday, April 25th.

Now for the really good news! Lake Champlain Chocolates is having a tasting this Saturday, April 25, at Lake Champlain Chocolate's 750 Pine Street Store & Cafe in Burlington. As Seven Days tells me - "The tasting will include a discussion of how chocolate is made, the differences between chocolates, desirable qualities of chocolate, and the six steps of tasting chocolate. Yummy!! Click here for a coupon for a free ice cream, good at any LCC retail store."

So who among you can argue with freebies, especially when it's Wine and Chocolate? Anyone?

Yay!

Ok Dessert lovers, and Dishing on Desserts followers, I'm back. Yep, troubles with the economy even hit yours truly and my dessert budget went out the window! But good times are back, so let it be heard that I have a shopping list (amazingly there are mostly desserts on it) in hand and am preparing to get those tasty desserts back in my hands and on the blog!

Tiramisu at Sarducci's

Thankfully the holidays are over and so, I hope, my crazy schedule and not enough time in front of my computer. Not that I haven't eaten any desserts, mind you, just that they were in the midst of a meal, were some fruitcake like thing I wouldn't want you to eat, or I simply was so rushed with all the gift swapping and other insanity that goes on, that snapping a photo and finding time to write about it was nearly impossible.

Time to breathe. Time to relax. Time to rediscover a real dessert!

So, there I was on Saturday. I found myself with time enough to spend with a friend in Montpelier, and we were both very hungry. It was a beautiful day - so a walk seemed like a good idea to get to the downtown area just a few blocks away. Sooner than we though we found ourselves walking into Sarducci's Restaurant for some Italian food in lovely Montpelier, VT.

Taking a seat by the window, the first order of business was a nice bottle of wine. As I said, I had some time and it was, all things considered, pretty early in the day. The choice of the day was the fairly inexpensive but flavorful Sangiovese Il Bastardo. When I'm sitting down for a meal that starts with roasted garlic and bread, then I better have a pretty flavorful wine to go along with it. A little air, a little more flavor saturated food and the wine began to develop and lend it's great fruit tones to the meal. So there it was, after a wonderful dinner of Mushroom Ravioli and Steak, it was time for the dessert menu! Which you may have guessed, or may already know, is my favorite part!

Well, since I haven't eaten there much before (only once in fact, and it was year ago) I decided to go my all time favorite dessert - Tiramisu! It's the yardstick of the dessert world, if your Tiramisu is good, then you're OK in my book.

The dessert was nearly divine. The chocolate on top wasn't sprinkled cocoa, in fact it was dark chocolate, giving a nice bitterness of the dark chocolate to the sweet fluffiness of the Marscapone. The only thing that seemed slightly amiss was the rum. It wasn't exactly as I expected, there wasn't much of a lasting flavor, it just seemed to disappear very quickly - which led me to believe it wasn't rum at all. The real stuff has the habit of hanging on a bit longer, and it's exactly what made my first attempts at making my own Tiramisu a miserable failure. Too much rum soaked into lady fingers can be a bad thing. Of course, it was the third time that ended up being the time I trusted myself to just touch the ladyfingers to the rum mixture.

So that one slight fault aside, the Tiramisu was very, very enjoyable. Of course, I certainly understand the reasons for not having actual rum in a dessert, but if I had my druthers, it would have been there. It was an empty hole in an otherwise complete meal. However, it was a tiny hole and I can assure you that next chance I get, I might find myself inside Sarducci's eating another meal and, perhaps, following it up with another taste of their Tiramisu.