In case anyone who watched last week's episode of Entourage was wondering which Teuscher chocolate is Lloyd's "favorite"... well, he doesn't say it straight out, but when Lloyd walks into Ari's office with a box of assorted Teuscher truffles, the light-colored (powdered sugar-dusted) ones in the center of the box are Teuscher's signature Champagne truffles. The camera then cuts to Ari, then back to Lloyd and half of the Champagne truffles are gone... so, as for his favorite, Teuscher's Champagne truffle (also my favorite) would be my guess.

Not one, but two chocolate desserts found their way onto a plate right in front of me this week:

Pots de Creme at The Beehive: I've been wanting to check out The Beehive ever since it opened in Boston's South End a couple months ago. The space is theatrical and cavernous, full of velvet and exposed brick (pic above). We liked it a lot there, at least until the music started... which was great, but it ended our conversation pretty much instantly. Thankfully, by that point, dessert had arrived and we just focused our attention on the earthenware crock of chocolate pot de creme in front of us. A bit of a twist on the smallish "pot" that this French dessert usually arrives in, the Beehive's version seemed pretty huge in comparison (though it's not like it was that big, just bigger than the norm - and anyway, we were sharing it between the two of us). After an exhaustive search through a mountain of homemade, barely sweetened whipped cream sprinkled with nutmeg (don't get me wrong, the whipped cream was fabulous... there was just a little too much of it), we found the chocolate part of the dessert. It was dense, stiff, and rich - much stiffer than classic pots de creme. The chocolate flavor was intense but not bitter at all, on the sweet side with notes of caramel.

Cocoa Bean Souffle at Oleana: Oleana is one of my favorite restaurants. Last night, four of us sat outdoors at a little table in their beautiful enclosed garden. We ended a really delicious dinner with a frozen cocoa bean souffle with a cocoa hazelnut tartlet topped with cocoa sherbet. We paired it with a late harvest Cabernet Sauvignon by Coturri Winery in Sonoma Valley. It was incredibly interesting - an exploration of the vast flavors and textures of the cacao bean. The souffle was mild and gentle on the palette, yet it had a lot of flavor. The smoothness of the souffle was a big contrast to the extremely crunchy, lively texture of the tartlet, which was intense and explosive. And the sherbet was just barely sweet, a little bitter, and had a focused, even, deep cacao flavor. Overall, the dessert made a pretty good pairing with the Cabernet, which was rich and port-like, though the souffle got somewhat overpowered and would have been better with a gentler, airier wine.

In addition to the truffles, the other items we picked up at Chocolate Bar in New York over the weekend were 6 of the Chocolate Bar's Retro Bars. The Retro Bars are solid chocolate bars with really fun, retro-classic fillings like key lime pie and raspberry jam. We broke them out after we got back from a really rockin' soccer game on Saturday night. We were starving.

Key Lime Pie: Key lime cream wrapped in dark chocolate. You couldn't mistake the key lime in this one, that's for sure, though I was hoping for more actual filling. The chocolate itself was pretty thick and over powered the filling a bit.

Coconut Cream Pie: Coconut cream wrapped in dark chocolate. Pretty nice. Just coconut-y enough - though it wasn't all that creamy. Kind of the same thing as with the Key Lime Pie; I wanted more coconut creaminess but it was overpowered by the chocolate.

Raspberry Jam: Raspberry jam wrapped in dark chocolate. This one was my favorite. Bill's too. Lots of raspberry, fun contrast in textures.

Salty Pretzel Milk: Milk chocolate with salty pretzel pieces. This one's a classic - sweet, crunchy, salty delicious... Dan voted this bar his number 1.

Salty Pretzel Dark: An interesting contrast to the milk... this one was Kristi's favorite. She really liked the dark chocolate salt combination.

Caramel Apple: Apple-infused caramel wrapped in milk chocolate. This was my second favorite. Very apple-y - more so than I expected - with a nice filling-to-chocolate ratio.

Another highlight from my NYC trip this past weekend was stopping by the Essex Street Market, an indoor market in the Lower East Side. We were accompanying our foodie friend Bill on a culinary shopping spree. Essex has been around since 1940, and has recently experienced renewed interest from New York culinary enthusiasts - particularly during the past year alongside a bunch of re-openings and grand openings of some really sweet gourmet food stalls. While there will soon be a chocolatier to be found among the many tiny kiosks and counters in the Essex market, I was most excited to visit Saxelby Cheesemongers. Anne Saxelby not only sells cheeses, creme fraiche, ricotta, and several other dairy products, but she also ages many of her cheeses in an onsite cheesecave. She sources all her stock from within the United States.

So Anne was there when we stopped by and I asked her for a couple off-the-cuff recommendations for cheeses can be paired with dark chocolate. She smiled and exclaimed that there are so many choices! Here are two:

Pleasant Ridge Reserve: This Gruyere-style washed-rind cheese is made in Wisconsin from the milk of a single herd of cows. We tried a piece while we were at the market - the flavor was smooth and a little nutty.

Bayley Hazen Blue: She told me that the sweetness and tanginess of blue cheeses can make a really nice complement to dark chocolate, and recommended this Vermont blue as one that would pair particularly well.

Saxelby Cheesemongers has been doing a series of chocolate, beer, and cheese tastings the last Wednesday of each month at Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village. The next one is on August 27th. The September event will feature the chocolate creations of Ellen Mirsky of emChocolatier. (Note that come October, the tastings will be held the first Tuesday of every month.) Anne also has a really great cheese blog at saxelbycheese.blogspot.com where she posts various tidbits about her experiences in the vast world of fine cheese.

Before we left New York earlier today, I stopped by Kee's Chocolate in SoHo for the first time. I had heard a lot about Kee's over the past couple years, then a couple friends urged me to check it out earlier in the weekend, so I made sure to swing in before our little NYC excursion was out. The shop was totally empty when we arrived with nothing to look at except the display case holding the truffles. Totally bare walls, nothing on the shelves... Maybe they are in the midst of renovating or something. I wanted to ask, but we had a plane to catch. (We made it, but only just.)

Kee's makes the kind of truffles I love more than any other - the kind that taste the way truffles do when a skilled chocolatier is making truffles at home in preparation for a dinner party for her close friends. Fresh, delicious, and full of love. There is one other chocolatier I've posted about recently that I placed in that category, and that's XOX in San Francisco. Kee's truffles are incredibly soft, so soft that they barely hold their shape and need to be kept cool so they don't get all melty and flatten in the summer air. The taste is big and explosive, deep, rich, and extremely memorable. The ones we tried were hand-rolled with a classic ganache center and a rough coating, one rolled in black and white sesame and the other in chopped, toasted pine nuts. (Note that Kee also does molded and dipped chocolates that sport a smooth tempered chocolate coating, but we didn't try any of those today.) I'm really into the rough coating - on one hand, it's a way to get out of tempering a melted chocolate coating if you don't feel like it, and on the other hand and more importantly, it adds awesome texture and can make the overall experience of the truffle really exciting.

I'm in love with Kee now. Really.

This weekend Dan and I are in NYC visiting close friends. In between a hectic schedule of eating, drinking, and hanging out, I managed to stop by the Chocolate Bar to pick up dessert for dinner last night. After a delicious meal of aged balsamic-drizzled steak frites (featuring no less than three varieties of 'frites' - classic pommes frites, crinkle fries, and tater tots), garlic spinach with butter-caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms, the 6 of us tasted 8 varieties of truffles and bon bons. The Chocolate Bar stocks a few lines of chocolate confections, one of which is made by Andrew Schotts of Garrison Confections. Those are the ones we tried. Garrison's confections feature a square-cut soft ganache, sometimes layered with pate de fruit or infused cream, enrobed in a thin layer of chocolate. Their line is all about creative harmonies of classic flavors, spice, and several exotic fruits (pomegranate, mango, guava, etc.). This line would be a good fit for a chocolate lover craving a subtle twist on the classics. Here are a few highlights of what we tried:

Blood Orange: This was an all-around favorite of the set. Two layers - blood orange pate de fruit over a milk chocolate ganache enrobed in dark chocolate.

Salted Caramel: Salt and chocolate is an incredible combination, and this is one of of Garrison Confections' best sellers. This confection featured a mildly salty, soft caramel center enrobed in dark chocolate. (It also had a thicker chocolate coating than the rest of the chocolates we tried, which intensified the blend of sweet and salty, and made sure that the chocolate wasn't overpowered by the sweetness of the caramel.)

Pomegranate: This one was Bill's favorite. A layer of pomegranate pate de fruit made a lovely match with a dark chocolate ganache enrobed in dark chocolate. The pate de fruit layer in this chocolate was thinner (1 part pate, 2 parts ganache) than that of the blood orange. The pom flavor was somewhat difficult for us to distinguish - I got a cherry-ish flavor, Kristi got more of a raspberry.

Spicy Mango: Our friend Karl picked this one out as an 'appetizer' to eat in the car on the way back from the boutique. It started off with the mango flavor and ended with a spicy kick that lasted well beyond the point that the chocolate was gone. In spicy chocolates, I often find that the spice comes in later on in the game, kicking things up a bit in the last few moments and lingering on into the aftertaste.

The other flavors we tried were:
PB Sizzle: Peanut butter + a bit of cayenne pepper
Caipirinha: Fresh lime juice + casacha infused in a milk chocolate ganache, enrobed in milk chocolate.
Single Origin: Classic truffle made with single origin chocolate, though oddly, no one at the boutique knew what origin the chocolate was actually from, we just knew that it all comes from one place...
Cafe Cubano: Coffee infused milk chocolate ganache enrobed in dark chocolate.

And as a last aside, somewhere in the middle of our chocolate tasting, we took a little break for some gelato from Il Laboratorio Del Gelato . Two flavors - peanut butter and mint chip. Pretty sweet. When we were picking up a few pints at Il Laboratario's gelato boutique earlier in the day, I also tried their honey lavender flavor, which was fascinating. Our friend Bill took us there. Il Laboratorio Del Gelato is Bill's favorite gelateria in New York City.

My office is in Davis Square in Somerville, MA. And to my great delight, so is Kickass Cupcakes. Or at least it will be soon. I've been walking by their coming soon sign on Highland Street for some time now, and was thrilled to hear from Kickass Cupcakes owner Sara Ross, who gave me the lowdown on this delicious Davis Square development.

Kickass Cupcakes will be open by September 2007. The cupcakes will be baked fresh each day, including classics like chocolate and vanilla and curious flavors like one of Sara's personal favorites, the Mojito cupcake. This cupcake rendition of my preferred drink of late features a rum-soaked cupcake topped with sugar cane lime frosting and a hint of mint. Then there's crispy cupcakes, cupcake parfaits, Pupcakes, and Kittycakes (so our pets can rejoice...) They will also be serving coffee, tea and other kickass beverages to complement their kickass cupcakes, which, according to Sara, will kick ass.

Kickass Cupcakes is at 378 Highland Ave in Davis Square in Somerville, MA. Impatient cupcake lovers who don't want to wait a day longer than they have to can sign up for the mailing list to find out exactly when they'll be officially open.

Beantown Cupcakes is in Winthrop, MA. But they deliver cupcakes daily to La Luna Caffe in Central Square in Cambridge, MA, and that's where I went to pick them up. One thing I've noticed this past week is that going to a different place for a different cupcake with a different person every day for 5 days is kinda tough to manage when you have a full time job that has nothing to do with cupcakes. In order to fit the South End Buttery into my day yesterday I made my poor friend Andrew meet me there at 8 am - which is not all that early, but is a little early in the morning to be eating cupcakes. Not that I'm complaining. Here are the results of Day 5, the final day of Cupcake Week at the Tasty Show:

Bakery: Beantown Cupcakes

Cupcake 1: Razzle Dazzle
Cupcake 2: Madison (Vanilla) Cupcake
Cupcake 3: Apple Pie Cupcake

Price: $2.50

Accompanying Friend: Dan

Presentation: Cute all around. I was instantly attracted to the way each cupcake had its own style and personality. The showy Madison promised a whole different experience than the earthier, homemade style of the Apple Pie.

Cake: The cake is pretty fluffy. A tiny bit crumbly as well - except for the Apple Pie, which was sticky with apples and super super moist. Lots of flavor and sweetness all around. (Sometimes a little too much for me.)

Frosting: The theme here is light. All three frostings were very light and soft. Razzle Dazzle is topped with a raspberry mousse and the Madison with a vanilla butter cream. The Apple Pie cupcake is topped with a cinnamon sugar crust and whipped cream.

Overall experience: Beantown's cupcakes are lovable and quite easy to eat. One of the first things I noticed was that they really put a whole lot of each recipe's starring ingredient in each cupcake. The Razzle Dazzle, which has dark chocolate cake, is very very chocolaty. The Appie Pie, which is a cinnamon cupcake with granny smith apples, is chock full of cinnamon. And then the Madison, as well, is all about the vanilla. The flavors are pretty strong and these little cupcakes are quite sweet. A guaranteed sugar fix. The chocolate and vanilla cakes were slightly on the crumbly side for my taste and less moist than I would like, though their frostings were soft and smooth and went nicely with their respective cakes. The Apple Pie cupcake was totally different. It was squishy, sticky, and ultra moist. Lots of apples, lots of cinnamon - I liked it, but it reminded me more of an apple pastry (like apple pie) than a cupcake. And knowing that it's called an Apple Pie cupcake, I'd imagine that that was the point. But I'd probably go for a more cupcakey cupcake if I have the choice. And apparently I do, since they have more than 25 different flavors to choose from.

Click here to see the 5-day plan and read the original Cupcake Week post.

Early this morning I went over to the South End Buttery with my friend Andrew who, I must add, was looking fantastic. Andrew and I hadn't hung out in months! We tried two cupcakes in Day 4 of Cupcake Week at the Tasty Show:

Bakery: South End Buttery

Cupcake 1: Simon Devil's Food Chocolate Cupcake
Cupcake 2: Madison Vanilla Cupcake

The above two cupcakes (and also their Harriet Carrot Cupcake) are named after the South End Buttery's owner's dogs. A portion of the sales of these three cupcakes go to local animal rescue efforts.

Price: $3

Accompanying Friend: Andrew

Presentation: Elegantly classic. Andrew also noted that rather than having frosting spread evenly over the surface of the cake, the frosting was applied over a smaller surface area with a higher overall volume leaving the outer edges frosting-free - different than what he usually expects with cupcakes.

Cake: The chocolate cupcake was excellent in every respect. It was dense and moist, structurally cohesive with a fabulous decadent texture. It had a deeper and more intense cocoa flavor than any other chocolate cupcake so far this week. I totally loved it. The vanilla was a whole different experience. Both Andrew and I found that the vanilla cupcake, while also dense, was kind of muffin-y. It was a bit drier with a more concentrated texture than the chocolate cupcake.

Frosting: Both cupcakes had sweet, super creamy, soft butter cream frosting (chocolate and vanilla, respectively). The chocolate frosting went extremely well with the chocolate cake. The vanilla frosting wasn't as good a match. It seemed a little too sweet and light for the density of the vanilla cake.

Overall experience: We both loved the chocolate cupcake. It was incredibly good in every respect. The cake itself was perfection. I can whole-heartedly declare that the chocolate cupcake at the South End Buttery is everything a chocolate cupcake should be. But then, in great contrast to our excitement over the perfection of the chocolate cupcake, neither of us were really into the vanilla cupcake. It wasn't all that cupcakey.

Click here to see the 5-day plan and read the original Cupcake Week post.

I went to the lovely Sweet Tooth in South Boston to pick up two cupcakes for the 3rd day of my 5-day cupcake hunt. The owner told me that Sweet Tooth has seven different kinds of cupcakes, and each cupcake is filled with custard or cream and elaborately decorated. Here's what we tried on Day 3 of Cupcake Week at the Tasty Show:

Bakery: Sweet Tooth

Cupcake : Chocolate Berry Cream

Price: $3.99

Accompanying Friend: Toby

Presentation: Pretty flashy. Sweet Tooth's cupcakes are quite ornate. Ours was topped with chocolate ganache, an additional intermediary frosting, and a big chocolate-dipped strawberry.

Cake: The cake (which was chocolate) was light, a little powdery, and had a very sweet chocolate flavor. It crumbled rather easily. Neither of us were really into the berry filling. I wished it would have been a little tangier. Toby said it reminded him of Twinkies...

Frosting: The ganache frosting was soft, rich, and smooth, and the dipped strawberry was a nice touch and went really well with the cake.

Overall experience: This cupcake was ok. Overall, I liked the choice(s) of frosting better than the cake, which was too crumbly for me. The combination of the cake and ganache was very nice. I love a rich ganache as a cake topping. I liked the idea of the berry theme, and it was great when we tasted the tart strawberry, but less so with the berry cream, which didn't add the contrasting tart berry flavors that I was hoping for.

Click here to see the 5-day plan and read the original Cupcake Week post.