Bake chocolate-covered mint cookies.
Photo courtesy Chocolat Céleste.

We love the Girl Scouts—we won the top award in our troop for selling 100 boxes of cookies.

But, as the Girl Scout Law states that “I will do my best to be honest and fair,” this recipe for Thin Mint cookies, developed by Chocolat Céleste’s Mary Leonard, is so much better!

• See the recipe for Chocolate Mint Cookies.
• Find more cookie recipes.

The answer may be “both”; but order early if you want to acquire these beautiful pieces of edible art from Bond Street Chocolate. They sell out!

To make these beautiful chocolate statues of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadeloupe (as well as Buddha and Moses), Bond Street Chocolate uses the finest E. Guittard’s 72% Coucher du Soleil, a dark, rich, smooth couverture chocolate with a creamy mouth feel and hints of thyme and jasmine. With all due respect, it is chocolate to pray for.

The chocolate is poured into handmade chocolate molds. The molded pieces are painstakingly hand-painted with edible gold leaf.

They are beautiful to look at, and you can keep the chocolate for up to a year as an object d’art before you have to decide whether it’s art or food.

Beautiful chocolate sculptures, embellished
with edible gold. Photo by Katherine Pollak | THE NIBBLE.

• Read the full review of Bond Street Chocolate and see more beautiful chocolate.

Alaea, Hawaiian sea salt, in coarse and
fine grains. Photo courtesy Saltworks.us.

The salts have the “goût de terroir” (goot duh tur-WAHR)—the flavor of the particular waters from which they are harvested. Each body of water has a unique mineral content, which can be tasted in the different salts.

Since most sea salts are unrefined, they deliver the nutritious traces of calcium, iodine, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium and zinc from their local waters.

Alaea, or Hawaiian sea salt (from the island of Kauai), takes its name and color from the area’s red volcanic clay. The sediment of iron oxide-rich red volcanic clay, called alaea, seeps into the ocean from Kauai’s rivers. When this red ocean water evaporated in tidal pools, alaea sea salt was born. In addition to its beauty as a garnish, alaea has a complex, earthy, mineral flavor.

Click here to learn your salts in our glossary of artisan salts.

In our youth, we were satisfied with Cadbury’s chocolate buttercream Easter eggs. But today, we’re more demanding. We want those eggs to sizzle.

So, we’re starting with Bacon and Eggs, one of the four gourmet Easter egg flavors from Vosges Haut Chocolat. It’s filled with bacon caramel (that’s caramel with bacon in it). If you’ve never had bacon chocolate, Vosges’ collection is one of our favorites (there are bacon chocolate bars, flying bacon chocolate pigs, bacon caramel toffee and a bacon and chocolate pancake mix).

But, there’s more temptation, in the form of three additional eggs; two are organic.

The PB in the Organic Peanut Butter egg is seasoned with Himalayan and Maldon salts. The Organic Wink Of The Rabbit is filled with caramel and pecans.

Wake up to Bacon And Eggs chocolate
on Easter Sunday. Photo courtesy Vosges.

The eggs are sold in boxes of five one-ounce pieces, in a purple box, for $22.00. Get them at VosgesChocolate.com.

• Can’t wait to see what’s up tomorrow? See all of our favorite Easter candy, cookies & more.
• Read our full review of Vosges Haut-Chocolat.

Today’s the day for a good Irish stout. Photo
courtesy CabotCreamery.com.

Irish beer has a relatively low profile in the beer world, where Belgians, Germans, Czechs and our own American microbreweries tend to take center stage.

The exception is Dublin’s Guinness. It’s ubiquitous, but it hardly leads a vanguard of the best Irish beers.

In the opinion of many, award-winning O’Hara’s Irish Stout, from a 10-year-old Irish brewery, makes a richer, smoother, more complex stout than the ubiquitous Guinness. It pairs well with everything, including seafood (we even continued to drink it with our dessert, apple pie).

Read our review of Irish beers and see how Guinness compared with Harp Lager, Fuller’s, Smithwick’s Ale and O’Hara’s.