Tag Archives: chocolate

Museum of Sex “Awaken Your Senses” Event

23 Feb

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the “Awaken Your Senses” event at the Museum of Sex.  It was touted as being a night filled with food and fireman.  Sold!  I invited That Lori of Stuff I Ate to join me.

WARNING: If you are too young or too easily insulted to be reading a post made about an event in a sex museum, please come back tomorrow when I promise more innocent posts will come up (though I can’t promise no cursing).  This also applies to anyone who may get nervous at the site of sculptures of private parts… Oh yeah… you can Where’s Waldo some interesting things in the pictures that follow.

I had been to the museum before (it’s a fun trip) but was excited to see an event they put on.  I was a bit late, so most of the fire fighters were already off of their calendar signing posts.

When we walked in, there was no sign, no greeting… just a table of food and people milling about. I would have loved some direction or a welcome, but we made do.

Funny thing… I wound up focusing so much on the food that I pretty much forgot about the firemen and only got one picture of them in the room!  (You can see the official pictures of the event at this link)

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The first food stop were truffles made by Mimi Truffles.

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This first bite (a spiced chai truffle) was the best thing I ate all night!

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The red velvet ones were pretty damn good too!  (Though they were both more like cake balls than truffles)

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(And made for some fun photography)

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The next set of desserts was brought to us by Michael Allen.  They had quite the spread of truffles, macarons, and other delectables.  I wasn’t overly impressed with this side of the table.

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I LOVE macarons, but these were a bit underwhelming (and the texture just didn’t have the snap that I have come to love for the cooking with the marshmallowy inside and filling)

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The left side of the display (all the way in the top left of the pic below), however, included mini canelés that were awesome.  Simply awesome.

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Sugar Sweet Sunshine Bakery had a display of wasabi cupcakes (that I avoided like the plague… NOT a wasabi fan) as well as the chocolate explosion bomb thing which was cake and mousse and something.  I was totally underwhelmed.  And obviously I didn’t care enough to photograph it.  So I had to end on a good note and get another chai truffle.

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Lori and I made our way downstairs to go to the bathroom and I had to giggle when I entered. I took EXTRA long and exploded in a fit of giggles as I exited and Lori looked at my quizzically.  How can you not giggle when a sex museum has a chalk board for people to write on in the bathroom?

I even left her a message:

And then she left the world a message:


(It’s true… we do)

Just outside the bathroom is a bar that JUST opened called “Oralfix”

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I liked the lamps…

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It was very modern looking.

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With a menu focused on aphrodisiac flavors.

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I also liked the tip jar…

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We opted for wine (people were milling with drinks that looked specific to the event, but we couldn’t find them… so we bought ourselves each a glass of Sexy Wine Bomb… not awful)

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I can only imagine what these are…

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As we were leaving, we perused the gift shop which included some notable books.

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And some fascinating stuffed animals…  (please… please read the tag and notice how they spell “Rabbit”)

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I wasn’t quite sure what a smoking labbit had to do with sex… then I turned it around…

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And that… my friends, is where I end this post.

In case you missed it, I was on The Wendy Williams Show on Tuesday, September 28th to compete in a Top Chef: Just Desserts segment with my NYC Nom Nom Double Trouble Peanut Butter Cup.  Two other audience members and I put our desserts up against each other to be judged by Wendy Williams, Gail Simmons, and Johnny Iuzzini.  It was a blast!

29 Sep

[youtube=[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_73dGSd7o&hl=en&fs=1]]

Chocolate Salty Balls

30 Aug

I had read about cake balls in just about every food blog I touched for a few months, so when a co-worker’s birthday came up, I had to try to make them. 

The idea is that you bake a regular cake, break it up and combine it with cake frosting so it becomes a fudgy texture, roll it into balls, then dip it in melted chocolate and let them harden.  What could be bad about that?  I actually chose to do brownies and combined it with cream cheese frosting.  Here are the rolled balls:

I had read that the dipping process could be hard as the balls are heavy and fall off a toothpick, so upon exploring candy dipping advice, I saw an ingenious idea.

It’s simply a plastic fork with the center two tines removed.  Easy peasy!  I made sure the balls were big enough to sit on the outer tines and then you just dip and scoop them out. 


One of my favorite things with chocolate recently is to add some sea salt.  (One of my favorite all-time recipes is chocolate covered toffee with salt). 

I know some people don’t love salt with chocolate, so I made some sweet versions.  The salted ones were GONE before the sweet ones were even halfway eaten. 

But they made for such a fun birthday treat!

Next time I really want to try red velvet cake + cream cheese or banana cake + vanilla frosting.

The recipe is really simple, but if you need some tips, here are two links:

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/cake-balls/Detail.aspx

and

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/tips-techniques/how-to-make-cake-pops-078637 (they feature the cuter version of putting them on lollipop sticks!)