On Little Chocolate Treats

A confessional, if you will.

Welcome to the Friday recipe post for paid subscribers. This one is near and dear to my heart because it is seasonal and delightful. On Tuesday, all subscribers will receive our first interview of 2024! Get excited, people! Wondering what I do when I’m not making this newsletter for you? Head to my website.

I am guilty of needing little chocolate treats before bed the way that my cat is guilty of running like the wind when she hears her food fall into her dish from the automatic feeder. By that, I mean that it’s just the way that my brain has been wired, and it is not my fault. It’s nature!

Here are the rules for the treat. I don’t want ice cream. I do not want a piece of cake. I don’t really like desserts as a general concept after dinner—give me a good espresso and amaro on ice—but as bedtime approaches, I get a hankering, and that hankering is for a piece of chocolate. Dark, preferably, but I’ll settle for milk if it has something crunchy and salty woven through. Just a piece, too. More than that, and I’ll be up for hours reliving my most anxious moments and dreading the dreams I’ll have the moment I finally fall asleep.

I think this need stems from being fed, almost as if on a drip, ice cream with thick, rich homemade chocolate fudge by my grandfather on summer nights as a kid. It’s family lore: he would get home from the opera or the symphony and creak up the stairs to the third floor of the house, poking his head slowly in to see if we were asleep before asking if we wanted to join him for ice cream on the porch. The answer was never no. As an adult and an aunt I understand how maddening this must have been to our exhausted parents. As a kid, it was the best thing in the world, knowing that there was a grown-up out there who understood that going to bed without chocolate was just not the way things were done.

Another memory: as the oldest child, I was the first to drop my afternoon nap. I remember, like it was yesterday, the feeling of quiet that descended as my siblings slept. On the weekends, my dad and I would bake brownies. There was a set of wooden colored blocks that we played with on the basement floor while we waited for the brownies to bake. I got to take the first warm bite of brownies before the other two woke up. One morning, when we were baking, I took a spoonful of the melted, bittersweet chocolate. My dad, with his famously fast reflexes, shoved a spoonful of sugar into my mouth, afraid that the bittersweetness would be too overwhelming to my young palate.

Chocolate has always been there, see? And it has to be there now. These chocolate treats are easy to make—barely a recipe—but if it’s still too much for you, nobody will judge if you just eat the chocolate and the cookies separately. Cheers to your chocolate!

Chocolate Dipped Strawberry Biscuits