White Chocolate-Coated Grapes with Orange Curd
A fine layer of white chocolate gives both green and red grapes a creamy crunch. The orange curd dipping sauce could not be simpler; it's hard to imagine a more elegant use of the microwave.
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White Chocolate-Citrus Parfait
When pastry chef Deanie Fox makes this parfait at the restaurant, she uses as many as 10 citrus varieties, from yuzu to tangerine. This streamlined version is still sensational, combining puckery lime curd and minty orange-grapefruit salad with light, luxurious white-chocolate mousse.
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Cinnamon Cake with Chile-Chocolate Buttercream
This sweet-spicy sensation features a cinnamon-flavored sponge cake and subtly spicy buttercream frosting made with ancho chile powder and cayenne pepper.
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Milk-Chocolate Cookies with Malted Cream
Mathew Rice grew up loving an Oreo-like sandwich cookie called Murray Chocolate Cremes. In this homage, he creates a malty filling for milk-chocolate wafers by mixing butter and sugar with Ovaltine.
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Chocolate Pots de Crème with Maple Caramel and Salt
Le Bernardin pastry chef Michael Laiskonis serves this milk-chocolaty dessert in an eggshell with caramel foam; it's known as "the egg." It's just as good in ramekins, topped with a simple caramel sauce blended with maple syrup.
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Chocolate Truffle Layer Cake
Kimberly Sklar was baking a crème fraìche-spiked chocolate cake and, by accident, took the pan out of the oven early. Discovering that the cake was superfudgy, she layered it with dark chocolate and white chocolate ganache, then covered it in dark chocolate frosting.
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Chocolate-Red Wine Cake
A recipe in Anne Willan's 2001 Cooking with Wine inspired this fluffy, not-too-sweet cake, which uses just enough wine in the batter to give it a slight boozy flavor.
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Bittersweet-Chocolate Bark with Candied Orange Peels
In this smart recipe, Grace Parisi boils orange peels in water, simmers them in sugar syrup and coats them in sugar. Then she tosses them with pistachios and spreads them over chocolate for a divine bark.
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Salted Fudge Brownies
Kate Krader recommends a flaky sea salt like Maldon, because the flavor is less harsh and it melts so nicely into the batter, accentuating the chocolaty sweetness.
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Bittersweet Chocolate Mousse
Ad Hoc's chef de cuisine Dave Cruz created this rich chocolate mousse as a refined homage to the pudding he loved as a child. At the restaurant he serves it simply, but it's also wonderful garnished with giant curls of bittersweet chocolate made with a vegetable peeler.
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