Death By Chocolate! Free eCookbook from Mr. Food!

Chocolate may be the most perfect food ever created! Get this great eCookbook for free when you sign up for the Mr. Food Recipe eNewsletter.  Death by Chocolate: Dessert Heaven with 30 of Our Best Chocolate Recipes has something to please everyone! 

Fort Lauderdale, FL (January 31, 2013) — Despite the global economic crisis with gas prices rising and overall sales dropping, one of the few products to continue to soar has been chocolate. In fact, according to a recent study by Voxxi.com, sales have increased by as much as 18%, a bright spot in the midst of a financial storm. The Mr. Food Test Kitchen knows just how much we all love chocolate, and with Valentine's Day and Easter just around the corner, we've got some of our favorite homemade chocolate recipes we know you're going to love with our latest free eCookbook, Death by Chocolate: Dessert Heaven with 30 of Our Best Chocolate Recipes.

Our rich and decadent collection has all of the best chocolate recipes for any of your forays into the land of dessert. If you're looking for some homemade candy to dispkat during the holidays, then you'll go wild for our Buckeyes. These smooth, creamy treats are like lil' bites of heaven. If you're lookin' for a recipe to fill up that cookie jar, then look no further than our Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies for the ultimate cookie action. We've even got an array of cakes and pies to suit your fancy. From our reader-favorite Old Fashioned Southern Chocolate Cake to our classy rendition of our Chocolate Meringue Pie, you'll never go out for dessert again! Perhaps you need a sweet treat to bring to the office party. If so, then our selection of chocolate brownies and bar cookies is just for you! From our too-good-to-be-true Brownie Cheesecake Bars to our Double Chocolate Toffee Brownies, you know you're in good hands with these recipes! If you're lookin' for a little bit of this and a little bit of that, then we think you're going to like our epic chocolate desserts including all-time favorites like our Death by Chocolate and our Chocolate Cookie Pudding. With layer upon layer of chocolate-y goodness, how can you go wrong? If you're looking for a breaded chocolate recipe, then you're in luck because we've got plenty of chocolate cupcakes and muffins just for you! From combining two of our favorite foods to create our Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins to our irresistible Million Dollar Cupcakes, we bet you won't be able to eat just one.
No matter what kind of chocolate suits your fancy, we know you'll find a recipe filled with that "OOH IT'S SO GOOD!!®"

Theft By Chocolate Guest Post!

This week I'm lucky enough to have this great guest post from Luba Lesychyn author of the new book Theft by Chocolate. A big thanks to Ms. Lesychyn for sharing her thoughts about this great new book with us :) Don't forget to enter the Theft by Chocolate Giveaway for your chance to win $150 in Chocolate!! 

Just What Is It About Chocolate?

by Luba Lesychyn

            Besides being the author of Theft By Chocolate, a sassy museum mystery about a woman of a certain age looking for chocolate, love, and an international art thief in all the wrong places, I work at a city college in Toronto that is home to one of Canada’s most renowned cooking schools. And I live in a city that has the most restaurants per capita than any other city in the world! So I have done a lot of enjoying, consuming, and contemplating of food over the years. And much of that food meditation has focused on what it is that I love so much about chocolate.

Chocolate is not the only food I love (though it is the only one with which I am truly obsessed). I love eating – plain and simple. And for twenty-five years, I have been a dedicated gym rat, and added dance and running to my activities over time, to accommodate my love of food. In other words, I have always worked out to eat.

 I became vegetarian three years ago and although I cut out meat, fish, and poultry, my love for food has not diminished. I miss some elements about these foods, but it has less to do with flavor and a heck of a lot more to do with another food characteristic. Allow me to explain…

When I first became vegetarian and was shopping for alternative foods at my favourite organic grocery store, the deli counter carried mock chicken and mock shrimp (tofu-based). I found these foods rather odd. Wasn’t the concept akin to people wearing faux fur instead of real fur (which to me is like saying “we’re going to pretend we’re wearing fur, but it’s not real fur, really”). So with the faux animal proteins, it’s like saying “we’re going to pretend we’re eating meat, but it’s not really meat, really.” Huh?

But as my days as a vegetarian continued, it all started to make sense to me. I began to miss the texture of meat, the way it broke down when you chewed it, the way it felt making its way down to my digestive system, and even the way it rested in my stomach.

So now I get the reasoning behind mock meats. It seems humans can more easily get over living without certain flavors than they can of being deprived of certain food textures. And this notion, I realized, applied as much to chocolate as it did to animal proteins.

I first noticed how much I loved the texture of chocolate after I started doing detoxes or cleanses, as they are also known. For a period of anywhere between a few days to a month, one eliminates products like meats, sugars, grains, and dairy from their body to help “cleanse” the digestive system and to rid it of toxins. People always ask me how I am able to be so disciplined about it considering how much I love my sweets, but once I commit to the process, I stick with it until it is concluded. Surprisingly, I have found that I can live relatively easily without these foods. But what I always find most challenging about doing a cleanse is not having a food that crunches like chocolate and then melts into a liquid treat as it glides down the throat.

I do eat a lot of nuts during a detox (note: a lot of cleanses advocate eliminating nuts, but I would starve without them), and they do satisfy the crunch factor I would normally get from chocolate. But there is nothing, nothing, and nothing that crunches and then melts like chocolate. I know carob has been touted by many as a substitute for chocolate. No offense to carob growers, but it ain’t chocolate.  

I’ve tried just about everything from meditation and hypnotherapy to Bach flower remedies and past life regression to eliminate my chocolate cravings – and been unsuccessful. The longest chocolate droughts I’ve had have been about three to four months, following hypnotherapy. I have tried to make peace with the fact that chocolate and I will likely be “one” for the rest of my life. But I will have to continually work on monitoring the quantity of chocolate I consume.

And some of those struggles are mirrored in the capricious adventures of chocolate addict Kalena Boyko in Theft By Chocolate.

Follow the Theft By Chocolate Book Tour! 

Connect with Luba Lesychyn  

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Attica Books (Publisher)

Theft By Chocolate Giveaway!

Theft By Chocolate

Theft by Chocolate is a brand new mystery novel! I can't wait to get a chance to read this book :) It's look really good! Plus, it has chocolate in the title! Don't forget to enter to win $150 in free chocolate by filling out the rafflecopter below! 

Theft By Chocolate

Chocolate addict Kalena Boyko wasn’t prepared for this. Heading to work at Canada’s largest museum as an administrator, she hopes for quiet and uninterrupted access to her secret chocolate stash. Instead she’s assigned to manage the high-profile Treasures of the Maya exhibition with her loathed former boss, Richard Pritchard.

With no warning, her life is capsized and propelled into warp speed as she stumbles across an insider plot that could jeopardize the exhibit and the reputation of the museum.

After hearing about a recent botched theft at the museum and an unsolved jewel heist in the past from security guard and amateur sleuth Marco Zeffirelli, Kalena becomes suspicious of Richard and is convinced he’s planning to sabotage the Treasures of the Maya exhibition.

Her suspicions, and the appearance of the mysterious but charming Geoffrey Ogden from the London office, don’t help her concentration. The Treasures of the Maya seems cursed as problem after problem arises, including the disappearance of the world’s oldest piece of chocolate, the signature object in the exhibit.

Theft By Chocolate is inspired by a real-life and never-solved heist at a Canadian museum in the 1980s.

Author Info

Soon after finishing her graduate studies in history, Luba Lesychyn (le-si-shin) landed on the doorstep of Canada’s largest museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, where she worked for more than twenty years as an educator and consultant. Theft By Chocolate is Luba’s debut novel, though she has been amusing people with her writing since the age of eight. Her love of chocolate precedes this age and she has been in and out of chocolate rehab for most of her adult life. She currently works in the educational sector and teaches yoga in her home town of Toronto. When not writing or looking for her next chocolate fix, Luba can be found in dance classes, trekking to remote waterfalls in the mountain rain forest in Puerto Rico, running through the streets of Paris or doing any other number of calorie-burning activities that help offset the calories consumed in her chocolate intake. 

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