With Cinco de Mayo just over the horizon, I can’t think of a better time to celebrate the pleasures of chile paired with chocolate.

I’ve long been drawn to the mysteriously spicy undercurrents that some chiles bring to rich, dark chocolate.  The mild, fruity taste of ancho chile in particular brings out unexpected layers of flavor in even ordinary unsweetened chocolate. Here, it spices up homey brownies inspired by Mexican ingredients.

The recipe began a few years ago with a box of Mexican chocolate that had been hanging around my cupboard too long.  Even though I always plan to make hot chocolate for myself, I never seem to get around to it. So I was looking another use for this chocolate blended with sugar and cinnamon.

I chopped up the grainy disks of chocolate and stirred together a batch of brownies based on a simple, one-bowl technique.  The first samples were so good that I tinkered some more, throwing in ancho chile powder and a couple of handfuls of buttery toasted pine nuts.

After several adjustments to reduce the sugar, this version emerged.  The texture is nicely moist, hitting the sweet spot between fudgy and cakey, and the flavor is more complex and elusive than most brownie recipes.  I’m hooked.

Think of these as bi-cultural brownies.  The basic concept is quintessentially American, but the personality is definitely Latina.

We’ve been on a craft beer kick ever since we took a road and ferry trip to Alaska a few years back.  There aren’t many wineries in the frozen North, so we went beer tasting at intriguing little breweries from Juneau to Homer.

Along the way, I developed a taste for stout.  It’s the antithesis of light beer — one pint is enough to last me all evening — but I love its thick, creamy body and dark, bittersweet  flavors hinting of coffee and chocolate.

I never really thought of stout for dessert, though, until I tasted beer ice cream for the first time last October.  The hoppy kick of a good stout brought a pleasantly bitter edge along the lines of burnt sugar and dark caramel to the ice cream.

Since my efforts at recreating beer ice cream at that time were such a success, I’ve been musing about a cake with chocolate and beer for months.  A little  bite from fresh ginger seemed like a good idea, too.  St. Patrick’s Day was the perfect excuse.

This cake is even better than I imagined.  It’s dark and moist with a nice balance of chocolate and ginger underscored by the earthy notes of chocolate stout from Oregon’s Rogue Ales brewery.  I’m sure it would work with Guinness, too, but this stout is exceptional.

The recipe is a mash-up of several ideas I picked up rummaging through my cookbooks.  The chief inspiration, though, was the gingerbread stout cake Rick Rodgers contributed to “Real Beer and Good Eats,” by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly (Knopf, 1994).  I used it as a starting point for my experiments.

My first lesson in playing around with beer as a cake ingredient is that all the carbonation must be exhausted before you stir the beer into the  batter.  I had measured the beer out and let it sit for more than an hour before I made my first cake and that wasn’t enough.

I knew I was in trouble when the batter started fizzing after the beer went in, but I just let it sit another half an hour before I scraped the batter into the pan, shoved it into the oven and crossed my fingers.  What a mess!  During baking, the batter rose so high, it overflowed the pan.  The cake was tall when I removed it from the oven but deflated as it cooled.

The flavor was a little too sharp and the texture was odd,  but it had possibilities.  So, the next day I set the beer out to go flat in the morning and mixed the batter with a different balance of cocoa, sugar, and ginger in the afternoon.  I substituted an organic corn syrup for half the molasses, too.

This cake was just what I was looking for, a substantial, not-too-sweet dessert with pronounced adult flavors.  It slumps a little in the middle because its so moist, but I consider that part of its homespun charm.

Of course, it pairs perfectly with beer although I prefer it with a nice cup of tea.

I’m sure the Irish would approve.

Hazelnuts and chocolate were meant for each other.   The rich, browned butter flavor of the nuts fairly cries out for the embrace of dark, dusky chocolate.  Together, they’re unbeatable.

I find the combination as inspiring as it is addictive.   (No jar of Nutella, or the organic alternative, Nocciolata, is safe around me.)

So it’s no surprise that I would be obsessed by the idea of a hazelnut cookie dipped in bittersweet chocolate for Valentine’s Day.  The cookie of my dreams would have a great sandy texture with just enough crunch to contrast with a smooth, dense coat of very good chocolate.   It should be elegant enough to pair with a flute of champagne but substantial enough to satisfy a serious sweet tooth.

The search led me to the classic Linzer, which usually sandwiches jam between spicy, buttery cookies.  I played with proportions, left out the spices to focus attention on the nuts and baked up a cookie worthy of a Valentine.  Dressed up in a velvet cloak of chocolate, it had my number.

Usually, a cookie with so much butter is as hard to handle as it is good to eat.  Right out of the refrigerator, the dough is difficult to roll. But after a few minutes, it’s too soft to cut into shapes.

Dorrie Greenspan, the baking genius, offers a clever solution in “Baking: From My Home to Yours” (Houghton Mifflin, 2006):  Roll the dough out between sheets of waxed paper before you chill it, then cut out the hearts and transfer them to a baking sheet while the dough is very cold.  It’s just short of a miracle.

To temper the chocolate, I used a microwave shortcut rather than the traditional method I used for chocolate bark (with hazelnuts, of course) in an earlier Valentine’s Day post.  I don’t think I would use it for candy, but it worked very well for cookies dipped not long before eating.

The chocolate was Callebaut, which is selling its couverture pieces at my local market now.  E. Guittard chocolate wafers are another good choice and any high-quality chocolate will suffice if you chop it roughly first.

You could bake the cookies ahead and freeze them if you wish. For the best results, though, dip within a day or so of serving.  The cookies soften if they’re stored too long after dipping.

That shouldn’t be a problem. Cookies this good don’t last long.

No matter how much I plan ahead for the holidays, it seems life starts spinning out of control about this time every year.

Here it is less than two weeks ’til Christmas and I still haven’t made any of the usual decorated cookies.  Maybe sometime next week.  Who knows?

With these buttery shortbread cookies in the house, I’m not too worried.  They’re so good in their natural state, one bite banishes all thought of frosting and sprinkles.

The beauty of these cookies is they’re so simple to make.  No rolling, no cutting into cutesy shapes, no decorating.   Just press the dough evenly into a fluted tart pan and bake.

Over the course of refining this classic recipe and it’s variations, though, I picked up a few tips to make Scottish-style shortbread even better:  Use the best butter, handle the dough as little as possible, and chill well before baking to let the flavors develop.

Butter is the heart and soul of shortbread, so you really don’t want to cut corners here.  I used some pricey vat-cultured butter from Sierra Nevada Cheese Company in one batch and the cookies were wonderful.  However, the Straus organic European-style butter at 85 percent butterfat also was incredibly good and a little less expensive.

Although most recipes call for letting the butter soften to room temperature first, I’ve had better results starting with cold butter, cutting it into small chunks and whirling it in the food processor.  If the butter is too soft and you beat it too long in an electric mixer, myriad tiny bubbles form in the dough, leading to unwanted rising and bubbling in the oven.

For the most tender results, you want the dough to be crumbly and loose before you press it into the pan.  Like pie dough, it shouldn’t be overworked.  It will continue to hydrate in the refrigerator and come together when the butter melts in the oven.

The vanilla bean shortbread should be a pale yellow when it emerges from the oven.  The equally delicious brown sugar variation is a little darker, hinting at its intriguing caramel flavor.

In deference to chocoholics, I’ve also developed a variation with cocoa and cacao nibs. Those chunky little bits of roasted cacao beans bring an extra layer of flavor to these cookies and it continues to develop as they’re stored after baking.  Scharffen Berger makes the nibs, which are readily found at most supermarkets.

After baking, cool the shortbread completely in the pan before cutting into the wedges known at petticoat tails in Scotland.

If you really must decorate, you could drizzle these cookies with melted chocolate.  But I wouldn’t.  They’re perfect just out of the pan.

Baking for Passover is a challenge, especially for cooks who weren’t raised in the Jewish tradition.  Dietary restrictions forbid the use of wheat flour, leavening — even confectioner’s sugar and vanilla extract, which rules out most of the average home baker’s best recipes.

Yet dessert is the one course where there’s room for innovation in a menu bound by tradition.  The brisket may have to be braised Great Aunt Ethel’s way for the seder every year and the matzo balls prepared according to an old family recipe, but everyone’s open to new delights by the end of the meal.  A guest can feel safe contributing something sweet to the feast.

This year, I’ve been playing around with a variation on the macaroons that I initially found in Jacques Pepin’s ”Fast Food My Way” (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).  I’ve adapted the recipe over the years to the point where Pepin probably wouldn’t recognize it anymore.

These are not your delicate, colorful Parisian macarons a la the famous patisserie, Pierre Herme.  They’re sturdy, chewy, home-style macaroons with deep almond flavor, a hint of orange  and a filling of bittersweet chocolate ganache.  Crunchy on the edges, they get softer and chewier in the middle as they stand.

As an added benefit, these cookies are gluten-free.

The dough is whirled together quickly in a food processor.  The only real trick is to leave plenty of space on the baking sheet for the cookies to spread.  If you’re not careful in portioning out the dough, the cookies can end up misshapen as well.  I’ve had best results by using a zippered plastic bag as a makeshift pastry bag and piping the dough onto the baking sheet in circles.  But spoons and small scoops will do.

Pepin’s original recipe uses prepared almond paste, which really speeds up the process.  I’ve substituted homemade almond paste to make the cookies more acceptable as a Passover dessert.  It only takes a couple of minutes to whirl together and the taste is fresher, with more pronounced almond flavor.

To balance the sweetness of the cookie base, I’ve also introduced a bittersweet chocolate ganache in the place of Pepin’s apricot jam filling.  That does create a problem for people who keep strictly Kosher, though, since the ganache brings a prohibited dairy element into a meal featuring meat.

A marmalade filling, suggested by my friend Sheila Himmel, is a better choice if seder participants observe Kosher dietary rules.

Meet my new favorite cookie.

I know, I’m a fickle cookie lover, easily distracted by the latest flavor sensation.  I’ve rarely met a homemade cookie I didn’t like.

But this combination of toffee and chocolate chips has my number.  It’s chewy and nutty at the center with crisp edges and the buttery flavor of toffee playing off  bittersweet chocolate chips. One just leads to another and another and…..

It all began with a cookie I spotted at the bakery counter at the local Whole Foods.  I was intrigued by the idea of a toffee cookie and the one I bought was pretty good.  But it was too sweet on balance and far too cakey for my taste.  I knew it could be much better with a few tweaks.

I started with a standard chocolate chip cookie batter and began playing around.  First I needed to find the toffee and, although I’ve read that toffee chips are available in markets, I couldn’t find any where I live.  So I settled on toffee candy bars — Skor brand were the best — and chopped them up myself.

I tweaked the proportions of ingredients, cutting the total amount of sweetener and shifting the balance from granulated to brown sugar for deeper flavor.  I added sea salt and doubled the vanilla.  Then I let the dough rest overnight in the refrigerator to allow it to hydrate.

The biggest change, though, was a switch from all purpose white to whole wheat pastry flour inspired by Alice Medrich’s incredible cookbook, “Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies” (Artisan, 2010).  Alice is a wizard and her whole wheat chocolate chip cookies are so good that no one would ever compare them to dowdy health food store cookies.

The key is the pastry flour, which is softer and contains less protein than regular whole wheat flour.  It produces a tender cookie with a nicely nutty flavor set off by a generous portion of toasted walnuts.

I’ve been baking these cookies all winter.  The story I tell is that I need to test the recipe one more time to make sure it’s right.  But I’m not fooling anyone.  I’m hooked.

I hope you love them, too.

Chocolate cream pie was always the ultimate treat when I was a child.  No matter the occasion, my Dad asked for one of my Mom’s pies piled high with beautifully browned meringue in the place of a more conventional cake.

I have never been a big pie baker, however.  The crust intimidated me for years before I learned that a food processor would do a far better job of cutting butter into the flour than I ever could.  Even then, the dough had to be rolled out and mine always stuck to the pastry board until I realized that I actually was using too little flour on the board in my fear of using too much.  I won’t even talk about my failures with meringue.

So when I was inspired to make chocolate pie—actually tarts—for Valentine’s Day, I decided to keep it simple enough even for the pie-phobes among us.  The crust is a peanut butter cookie dough pressed into the pans rather than rolled out  The filling is a rich pot de creme quickly made in a double boiler, which is easy to improvise.  The topping is straight out of an iSi cream whipper, although it’s not hard to whip cream with a wire whip or electric mixer.

Think of these tarts as deconstructed peanut butter cups with much better ingredients.  Deep, dark chocolate beats out wimpy milk chocolate in my book any day.

Homey chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies are all very well for the rest of the year.  The holidays, though, cry out for something spectacular.

It takes an over-the-top cookie like these chocolate cherry hazelnut bars to stand out among the fanciful sugar cutouts, elaborate spritz and spicy gingerbread men found on platters at every neighborhood party and office pot luck this time of year.

I usually try out a new cookie every year during the holidays, but this recipe has become a standard.  It’s always a hit on the cookie platter and it makes great gifts, too.  The fact that it takes only minutes to pull together only adds to its charm.

The generous layer of high quality chocolate atop a crunchy cocoa-dusted crust makes a truly decadent offering.  I use the best bittersweet and milk chocolate I can find—Valrhona when I can find it at a good price. What really sets these cookies apart from the familiar 7-layer bar recipe  found on  the back of cans of sweetened condensed milk, though, is the grown-up flavors of tart dried cherries and toasted hazelnuts.

The only problem is they go fast, even though they’re incredibly rich.  So slice the bars smaller if you’re expecting a crowd.

Or set aside a few for yourself.  The cook deserves a treat, too.

Quick: Passover is only two days away and  you’ve been invited to a seder.  What can you bring for dessert?

That question can be challenging enough for cooks who were raised in the Hebrew tradition and understand all the dietary restrictions on flour and leavening associated with this celebration of the Jews’ escape from Egypt in biblical times.

For the rest of us, there’s matzo crunch.  This addictive treat pairs bland and brittle matzo—an unleavened bread that could qualify as the poster food for Passover—with the caramel and chocolate flavors of toffee.  It’s crisp, sweet and impossible to resist.  Only the most self-disciplined can eat just one piece.

Best of all, you can throw it together in minutes and no one will guess how easy was.  There are only four ingredients—matzo, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips.  You can add toasted sliced almonds, if you want, and a sprinkle of sea salt is a great addition. But neither is really necessary.

If your hosts keep strictly kosher, you may need to substitute Passover margarine for butter and make sure you buy kosher brown sugar and chocolate chips, such as those made by Guittard.

You may be familiar with this sweet treat if you’re Jewish.  It’s been making the rounds of  Jewish kitchens  for a couple of decades.  Cookbook author Marcy Goldman first published the recipe in the 1998 edition of “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking” (republished in paperback by Whitecap Books, 2009). She likes to tell the story of a neighbor giving her a faded photocopy of the recipe, then laughing off Goldman’s comment that she developed the recipe.

I stumbled across the recipe last year about this time on David Lebovitz”s great blog.  If a renowned pastry chef was making it, I figured it must be good.  Even then, I was amazed by how terrific it was.

Since then, I’ve found the recipe in myriad minor variations all over the web.  Some cooks follow Goldman’s recipe to the letter.  Others add vanilla and increase the chocolate chips dramatically.  I like it best with bittersweet chocolate chips in double the amount called for in Goldman’s recipe.

I also bake it at a little lower heat because my first batches came too close to burning.  And I wait until the candy has totally cooled before I break it into pieces.

This confection is so good, I now eagerly await Passover season—when boxes of matzo appear on the shelves of ordinary grocery stores—just so I can make several batches. Some recipes suggest you can use saltine crackers instead of matzo in a pinch, but that sounds too salty for me.

You don’t have to be Jewish to adore matzo crunch.

My friend Susan’s mother passed away recently, just two weeks shy of her 99th birthday.  With her went the secret to some of the best brownies I’ve ever eaten.

Sylvia Cohen was a charming, gracious and accomplished woman who graduated from Radcliffe in an era when few females went to college. As was expected at the time, she gave up her personal ambitions to raise three children and support the academic career of her husband, Nathan Cohen, who went on to become dean of the School of Social Welfare at UCLA.  She was a lifelong defender of social justice and surely wouldn’t have considered her brownies a significant contribution to the world.

Yet her incomparable brownies came up time and again as her family remembered this remarkable woman last month.  Although Sylvia had shared her recipe freely, no one else had ever achieved the voluptuous texture that she did using the most common ingredients: Baker’s unsweetened chocolate, margarine, sugar and flour.  Her brownies were dense, moist and incredibly silky with a generous portion of walnuts for a crunchy counterpoint.

“It was the consistency that was so amazing,” Susan recalls.

Some things are clear.  Everyone knew that Sylvia undercooked her brownies.  As soon as they came out of the oven, she topped them with waxed paper, bundled them in a towel and whisked them into the freezer.  When they were cooled, she trimmed off the edges, keeping only the fudgy center, before returning them to the freezer.  In later years, she served them straight out of the freezer, which only seemed to improve their already irresistible texture.

But why couldn’t anyone else get the same results?  I’ve made variations on the recipe several times in the last couple of week and I suspect, in part, it may be an issue of ingredients. No one I know still cooks with margarine, much less the same brand Sylvia preferred.  Some family members think she might have used Imperial, the brand with a crown on the box.

Flour, too, can make a great difference.  A moderate protein flour, such as bleached all-purpose Gold Medal, delivers a more tender crumb than the higher protein unbleached flour that many cooks use today.

Technique and experience also are critical.  Chocolate is a delicate ingredient and needs to be treated gently, warmed just enough to melt.  Alice Medrich, who knows chocolate better than anyone, calls for melting chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl set in a wide skillet of barely simmering water so you can monitor the temperature of the water easily.

Perhaps just as important, only Sylvia knew what her brownies should look like when they were done.   By trial and error, I finally decided the edges should be set and look a little dry while the center should have lost most of its gloss and be just firm enough to touch lightly.  A toothpick stuck in the center should come out very moist.

Baking at the right temperature is essential, too.  Since ovens vary widely—mine runs almost 50 degrees colder than what it says on the dial— it’s a good idea to use a thermometer to ensure the correct setting.

In the end, it seemed foolish to try to replicate Sylvia’s brownies.  I’m not going to cook with margarine, nor do I want to use ordinary baking chocolate when there’s so much better quality available now.  Instead, I took her brownies as inspiration for a new recipe made with the best ingredients I could find.  I also opted to wrap the baked brownies tightly in heavy duty foil rather than a towel before stashing them in the freezer.  They fit better that way.

If the texture isn’t quite the same, the flavor is remarkable.  Good chocolate—I like Scharffen Berger unsweetened—contributes a fruity note and faint undertones of cinnamon while brown sugar brings a new layer of complexity.

These brownies are my tribute to Sylvia, who proved once again that good food makes great memories.