Dead and Ganache

It is time to head into fall with tasty treats and excellent reads.  The next two months picks will be Halloween related but I just can't start until October so this month I will end with a chocolate book after all isn't Halloween about sweet treats.




Chocolate, who wouldn't like a story about chocolate?  Added bonus we get to learn a bit more about Harvard aka, Hayden's voice crush financial advisor who faces his fear of flying to be by her side (and she didn't even ask him to).  The muscle of the story, Danny is laid up from eye surgery so we have a flip flop of roles.  Hayden Mundy Moore, chocolate whisper, is in a small French village to wish her mentor Philippe Vetault happy retirement when he is brutally murdered with a chocolate chipping tool that apparently no true chocolatier would ever use.  So many possible culprits there is the Mentor's latest protégé to a French pop star's video crew to the rival company that is marrying into the Vetault family and even his own wife and her lover, not to mention the usual town suspects.  Another great book with great recipes and I LOVE that Travis made a visceral appearance and hope to see him just as involved in future installments!

Coke Zero or Coke Zero Sugar

Who can resist those cute little aluminum cans that various Coke products can be found in these days.  I certainly could not when I saw the new Coke Zero Calorie.  I tend to stay away from artificially sweetened beverages since starting the Bulletproof Diet way of life this past January.  According to the nutritional information (sounds like a misnomer right) both products have the exact same ingredients.  So then they should taste the same, right?  However I realize that if you add a little more of something and a little less of something else it will change the flavor of what you are concocting. My guess is that the true ingredients are proprietary so we will never really know what gives Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, or Coke Zero Sugar the flavors that they are infused with.  For my part after trying the new improved Coke Zero Sugar, it tastes like they upped the clove flavor a tad and there isn't the after taste quite as much as with a Diet Coke but all in all my taste buds detected very little in the way of a NEW and IMPROVED flavor.  Both products are/were sweetened with Aspartame and not sugar so they are/were both zero sugar either way.  My  house is more of a stevia group these days and we try to stay away from the lure of sugar sweet syrup disguised as thirst quenching beverages.