Choc It Up: Chocolate Recipes

New Englanders have been importing chocolate since the late 1600s, when spiced hot chocolate drinks were served in Boston public houses. Over the ensuing years, our appetite for nature’s most seductive fruit has only grown—and given the abundance of award-winning confectioners and bean-to-bar chocolate makers in this region, we are truly in chocolate’s golden age.

Take Ragged Coast Chocolates in Westbrook, Maine, which Weekends with Yankee visited in Season 7. Co-owner Kate Shaffer began the business with her husband while living on tiny Isle Au Haut, but as their sales grew, they moved to the mainland. With that growth came a larger product line, including bittersweet baking chocolate and rich cocoa powder, which you can use to great effect in the following recipes.

The first recipe, a layered chocolate-butterscotch bar called Millionaire’s Shortbread, comes by way of Scotland. (If you’ve ever eaten a Twix bar, you’ve had the pale facsimile of what these bars can be.) The butterscotch layer is easier to make than caramel, and the rich toffee flavor is intoxicating, especially when paired with bittersweet chocolate.

The second dessert, a chocolate-mandarin tart, is loosely inspired by the chocolate-orange Milano cookies that were my high school obsession. The tart is fancy enough for company but easier to make than you’d think.

Get the Recipes:

Millionaire’s Shortbread

Easy Chocolate-Mandarin Tart

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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