If our guest blogger, Jennifer Pieszak, ever wanted to chuck her career as an award-winning architectural lighting designer, she could open a beautifully lit bakery and there would be lines around the block for her superb cakes, desserts, muffins, cookies, scones and breads. I am honored she has chosen to share her “signature dessert,” The Best Cheesecake in Chicago. This black and white cheesecake is truly the best—it’s luscious, gorgeous, easy to make, and punctuated with chocolate. Here’s what Jennifer wrote: “When I was growing up in suburbia, Chicago and my grandmother came to represent the exotic and new. She lived on Chicago’s near north side in what is now the very trendy Lincoln Park…
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Black Magic Cake Works Its Wizardry
Black Magic Cake: The Platonic ideal of a chocolate cake Whatever your passion—milk, dark, or super-antioxidant dark—chocolate has a special relationship with your pleasure center. From FudgSicles to Chunky bars to Sky Bars, chocolate melts into happy memories. There are probably better chocolate delivery systems than cake. Flour and overbaking can mute the flavor. This explains the popularity of molten lava cakes and dense brownie-like cakes. Layer cakes can get dry or wimped out. For decades we had a reigning chocolate layer cake recipe in our household. We were happy. No complaints. But that was before I experienced my recipephany. I opened The Hershey’s Chocolate Treasury, copyright 1984, which I bought a few years…