Chocolate and More Chocolate Passover Desserts

When it comes to Passover desserts, you have two options: (1) make a recipe that substitutes potato starch or matzoh meal for flour, or (2) use a recipe that does not depend on flour. Option two is usually the most successful.

Flourless chocolate cakes are the most obvious choice (and I will get to my favorite momentarily). There are cookies that are more or less flourless that are great options as well.

Maida Heatter’s famous chocolate cookies (also known as Soho Gobs, Mudslides, Bittersweet Decadence and a bunch of other names) are a fail-safe cookie choice. I especially like Alice Medrich’s take on this cookie in her book Bittersweet. Just substitute potato starch for the minimal amount of flour called for in the recipe.

I just discovered another winner: Beacon Hill cookies, as reinterpreted by Alice Medrich. So easy and so good–the only catch is that the cookies do not have much of a shelf life.

Zuni Cafe’s Zucchini Pickles

These pickles have been on my to do list forever. They come from an amazing cookbook: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, by Judy Rogers.

I have the book sitting 2 feet from me right now, but the recipe is online. The LA Times included the recipe in a great article on pickles a while back. (Uh, like a whole year ago . . . .)

And Luisa made them. When she was feeling depressed. 

Well, if she can do it, so can I.