Simmer

This is a miracle of culinary chemistry. This simple mix of melted chocolate and corn syrup renders the chocolate pliable enough to shape, yet firm enough to hold its form once you craft it. Makes chocolate flowers, letters, animals—any decoration you can dream up.

This white chocolate plastique makes the perfect modeling chocolate, and the ivory color is beautiful on its own or can easily be combined with food coloring for colored flowers, leaves, and holiday decorations. It works very much like the dark chocolate version (opposite page), but it needs a smaller amount of corn syrup and a little cornstarch.

This recipe offers treasures of the Caribbean “sugar islands”: chocolate, sugar, and rum. It’s a classic French buttercream using a cooked sugar technique, pâté à bombe, to blend and aerate the eggs and sugar, which creates incomparable richness. Or maybe it’s the butter. Or maybe it’s the chocolate. You get the picture—it’s rich! One batch makes enough to ice one 2-layer cake, but if you like generous layers and rosettes, double this recipe. Allow time to chill the buttercream. If soupy, chill it for another half hour. If stiff, heat it over a saucepan of hot water, then whip it. For children, you can omit the rum.

Ganache is one of the great creations of the chocolate world. It is a very versatile emulsion of melted chocolate and cream. It can be poured as a glaze, whipped to make icing, piped to decorate cakes, shaped into truffles, thickened with butter, flavored with alcohol and herbal infusions, or blended with fruit. While you can certainly make ganache by hand with warm chocolate, warm cream, and a whisk, the food-processor method, below, is favored by many pastry chefs and chocolatiers. The rapid action of the machine’s blades creates a smooth texture and a very stable emulsion. Immersion blenders work well, too. If you envision a cake with thick icing layers and decorations, double this recipe.

Here is a silky and easy-to-make chocolate glaze. It creates a thin layer of satiny chocolate for cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, and pound cake. The quality of the ingredients really counts in this one—use your best chocolate and butter!

Many recipes for this Latin American caramel sauce suggest using a can of sweetened condensed milk. But if you make dulce de leche from scratch, as this recipe specifies, you’ll get a delicate sweetness from cooked sugar and fresh milk no canned product can ever match. It is very easy but takes a long time—about 1 1/2 hours, even though all you have to do is give it an occasional stir. Here’s the trick: choose a time when you’ll be in the kitchen awhile—maybe a weekend afternoon or a night you are making another slow-cooked sauce. This version, untraditionally, is flavored with milk chocolate. Serve over ice cream or pound cake.

Like chocolate, the chile peppers that give chili its name and flavor come from Mexico. By assembling the many ingredients below and allowing them to cook together over low heat, you can easily imagine earlier versions of this Mexican stew (despite a few modern concessions). The cocoa powder adds depth and earthiness to the spicy indigenous flavors. This is a big batch and serves 15 people. You can also freeze it.

Sugarplums, made famous by the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker Suite, is an old-fashioned English word for candy. It evokes the sweet glory of a dried plum, also known as a prune. Lately, body-cleansing properties of prunes have made them embarrassing. But so what if they are healthy? They are also beautifully sweet like candy, full of wrinkle-fighting antioxidants, and charged with fiber and vitamins. In this recipe, with an assist from dark chocolate, prunes regain their rightful place as sugarplums. This sauce makes a fine duet with ice cream or a slice of pound cake (see Breakfast-in-Bed Pound Cake, page 26).

This is a classic fudge with the full flavors of fine chocolate and cooked cream. You’ll need a small, heart-shaped cookie cutter. Otherwise, you can cut it into simple squares or triangle shapes.

This rich cocoa warms the heart and soul like no other. After you’ve served the cocoa, the leftover amount makes a good base for chilly chocolate milk the next day. Store it in the refrigerator and just splash in cold, fresh milk to lighten it up.

When you need a satisfying meal that uses ground beef, try this recipe. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. Just brown the beef, heat the sauce, and add the rice. Then ring the dinner bell!

If you like gumbo, you will like this one-dish beef meal. This recipe lends itself well to experimentation, so try different vegetables and beans for variety. To stretch the number of servings, ladle the mixture over steamed brown rice.

If you’ve been on the lookout for new ways to use leftover ham, here’s a main dish to try. Pineapple slices are a great complement as a side dish or for dessert. Replace the spicy brown mustard with a flavored mustard, such as orange, horseradish, or honey, if you wish.

A classic dish gets a quick makeover. Some flavor combinations never go out of style!

Today’s low-fat sausages make it easy to enjoy heart-healthy versions of some Eastern European dishes, such as this one.

This bubbling stew incorporates the basics of a traditional Italian dish called ribollita, but it takes much less time to prepare. A savory way to use leftover ham, the stew is just right for warming up before the Friday-night football game.

This hearty dinner in a bowl is a great comfort after a hectic day, especially since you don’t need to chop anything to prepare it.

While the steak is simmering, prepare instant brown rice to serve with the sweet and spicy sauce. Round out the meal with tossed salad or your favorite green vegetable.

Cubes of beef are browned and simmered with colorful vegetables and thin noodles in this tasty, soupy Asian stew.