Sugar Savvy

While I’ve never been a proponent of online dating, a recent experience showed me that the internet can indeed bring kindred spirits together. Through star-crossed postings, I discovered Seneca Klassen’s chocolate blog, and he discovered mine. Since I was writing an article on chocolatiers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he was hard at […]

Chili (or chile) is now part of the common hot chocolate arsenal. On the eve of Friday the Thirteenth, why not toast the dark side with a glass of this libation?
Demonic Hot Chocolate
Chop or grate one ounce each of dark chocolate and milk chocolate into small pieces (remember to use a high-quality couverture–make sure […]

Hot chocolate is unusually easy to make: it requires only a basic recipe and the understanding of a few simple principles.
You need two ingredients to make a true cup of hot chocolate: chocolate and milk. (The Maya and the Aztecs used water instead of milk, and you can still find chocolate con agua […]

“When we modern Westerners think of chocolate, we think of it in its solid, sweetened form…. Yet during nine tenths of its long history, chocolate was drunk, not eaten.”
-Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate
Hot chocolate deserves a lot of attention. For thousands of years, it has been […]

I’m an itinerant traveler, a lover of literature, and a native New Yorker who’s currently based in Australia. I’ve also been a movie reviewer, a reproductive health researcher, and an independent bookstore owner.
I grew into an everyday cook a couple of years ago when I lived in the historic Central American town of Antigua, […]