While chocolate cake may always be a crowd pleaser at dinner parties or other celebrations, it can also feel like a cop-out to a creative host or hostess. If you’re tired of presenting the same old chocolate cakes, puddings, or ice creams to your guests for dessert, try these suggestions for some unexpected chocolate dessert recipes. Don’t be afraid to be adventurous. Dessert is all about having fun!

Revamp Other Dessert Recipes with Chocolate

An easy way to make a fun, new dessert is to incorporate chocolate into other familiar dessert recipes. Try putting dark chocolate chips and walnuts into a berry cobbler, or spruce up after dinner coffee with some chocolate liqueur then top with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. If you’re going light, add some extra life to an angel food cake with some natural unsweetened cocoa powder and serve with fresh raspberries on top.

Leave the Chocolate to The Whim Guests

A really simple chocolate dessert recipe is chocolate fondue. Let your guests go to town dipping an assortment of fruits, cakes, cookies, and nuts into a nice fondue. Spread out a few different fondue pots and play with flavors. Try a spicy chocolate fondue by adding just a touch of chili powder, or some peanut butter for a heavenly treat. Don’t limit your dippings to fruit. Cut up an assortment of bite-sized bits of cakes, brownies, candies, marshmallows, even cheesecakes.

Spicing Up Some Favorites

If you do like the idea of a cake, but want to get away from traditional recipes, spice things up a little with a modern chocolate cake dessert recipe. Add some fruit or berries to the bottom of your bake pan and create a chocolate-upside-down cake with a nice coffee or caramel glaze. Create a layered chocolate cake, alternating layers of caramel sauce and homemade whipped peanut butter topping, served with vanilla ice cream.

Frozen Chocolate Dessert Recipes

Plan ahead and whip up a frozen chocolate dessert recipe. Try a banana split with frozen chocolate covered bananas. If you have an ice cream maker, try a nice chocolate and fruit sorbet. If you’re a fan of Smores, don’t worry about the fire, try a frozen version instead. Spread some melted chocolate and marshmallow cream between two graham crackers, wrap each smore in foil, and stick in the freezer. This is an easy chocolate dessert recipe that is sure to be a crowd pleaser.

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Guide - Choose chocolates with the least amount of refined white sugar or other sweetener. Dark ‘bittersweet’ chocolates with a high percentage of cocoa solids (usually the label will state the exact percentage) have less sugar than semisweet or milk chocolate and also have the greatest health benefits.

We humans are strange indeed. People spend so much energy in an attempt to look and feel younger, that they so often miss the fact that they are using so much precious time doing so. Could the answer to retaining youth be right under our very noses, could something as well known as chocolate be the answer?

Age is seen as the ultimate enemy of the modern man and woman. With the pressures to always be on top and keep climbing, capturing the energy and vitality of youth has a compulsion many cannot ignore. Through history a variety of notions to stop the effects of time have surfaced and allured so many. In the sixteenth century, the insane Countess Bathory and her ‘associates’ murdered over 600 young girls for blood baths, in their quest for immortality. Many of the less morbid antidotes to ageing taste nasty, smell funny or are simply unaffordable. Can it be that something as pleasurable and universally accessible as chocolate, could be a youth serum?

Guide - Several medical studies show that eating chocolate in moderation can actually prolong your life by reducing risk of blood clots and fighting bad cholestorol.

Preposterous you say? Perhaps not, the cocoa bean, the essence of chocolate, has a complex chemical makeup that we are still trying to understand. What we do know however, is that chocolate contains flavinoids - healthy chemicals (a sub-group of polyphenols), that are widely believed to possess several health benefits.

Flavinoid’s strongest health related property is as an antioxidant. Antioxidants combat free radicals which are naturally produced by your body and cause irreversible damage (oxidation) to cells. Free radicals can leave your body vulnerable to premature aging, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and degenerative diseases like arthritis and although modern science has increased our average life spans, environmental factors like cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, radiation from UV exposure, and stress can increase free radicals. So finding a source of antioxidants to counteract this could well leave you looking and feeling younger.

To get the most out of this particular fountain of youth you should eat chocolate with as high a percentage of cocoa as possible, it is only these dark chocolates that have a significant level of flavinoids, in order to obtain the light and sweet taste in milk chocolate, many of them are processed out. So eating mass produced candy bars you find in your local supermarket which are very low cocoa content (and are in fact not really classified as chocolates), is not likely to do you any good, in fact the concentrated sugars and artificial flavorings are probably bad for your overall health if eaten regularly.

Guide - If you have a wrapped chocolate bar, remember, it must be unwrapped and allowed to breathe like a fine wine. Many people yield to the temptation of ripping open a candy bar and immediately taking a bite.

Chocolate a health product? Are you shaking your head? Well for all the skeptics out there you should look at it like this: a bit of sumptuous chocolate may not be the key to immortality, but it always makes you smile and that’s gotta keep you young.

Guide - The shelf life of a bar of chocolate is approximately one year.

I can be contacted by submitting a query at http://www.neuhaus-chocolates.com

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Guide - ‘Life is like a box of chocolates..

Chocolate has been viewed as a global delicacy for centuries, but only recently, it has been discovered that chocolate contains an array of phytochemicals, considered highly valuable to our health. Cocoa products, including chocolate, are among some of the most concentrated sources of flavinoids - rich antioxidants. These antioxidants have the ability to destroy free radicals and inhibit lipid oxidization.

This is good news. That means that if you eat chocolate, you are actually lowering your risk of cardiovascular disease, increasing your trace mineral intake capabilities and intaking an anti-inflammatory. There are also rumors that chocolate can help in the fight against cancer.

Guide - Children are more likely to prefer chocolate when they reach 10-11 years old than when they are younger.

Antioxidants are well known as powerful anti-aging allies - a boon to discriminating bathroom counters everywhere. That also means that if you spread it on your skin, chocolate will return a youthful glow and protect from the effects of sun and pollution.

The fat content in cocoa butter is composed mainly of a high quality linoleic acid. This gives chocolate the capacity to reduce fine lines, scars and stretch marks. Skin is allowed to slowly regain lost elasticity.

Chocolate has been valued as a sacred mood-enhancer since its discovery. It has been believed to be an aphrodisiac as well as an antidepressant.

Guide - It is widely believed that chocolate consumption releases a chemical into your body very similar to what is produced when you are in love.

French women have an interesting take on indulgence - never deprive yourself. Eat chocolate whenever you crave it. The catch is that a French woman will buy one piece of the most exquisite chocolate she can find, and she’ll spend ten minutes eating it. A far cry from grabbing a couple Caramilks out of the two for one bin.

Guide - The shelf life of a bar of chocolate is approximately one year.

Just imagine the possibilities - get yourself some good chocolates and enjoy them in the tub with some body chocolate.

Ivy Mills has been researching chemical sensitivity and natural alternatives for over five years and has brought her knowledge to the marketplace in her company, Valhalla Essences. Her personal experiences have fed a passion to help others with the same problem. Ivy welcomes others to share their stories and experiences on her blog, Peaceful Power.

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