Since there’s an extra Thursday this month, I get to do a bonus recipe! At first, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make; I felt like the main menu had already covered what I considered to be the most important Three Musketeers dishes. Then I remembered the mysterious “breakfast of chocolate” d’Artagnan eats at a friend’s house midway through the book. I did a little research to figure out what it was, and the most likely candidate seems to be hot chocolate. As it turns out, people in France often have hot chocolate with their breakfast. D’Artagnan speaks about his chocolate breakfast as if it were a small, insubstantial meal, and having only a cup of hot chocolate would certainly fit that description. As such, I decided to make authentic French hot chocolate as my bonus recipe, and boy oh boy was that a good choice! The recipe I use here is a slight variation on one by Erin from Well Plated, which is a copycat version of Cafe Angelina’s famous hot chocolate. This thick, smooth hot chocolate has enough intense, rich flavor to satisfy even the most ardent chocoholic!
You may recall I had trouble deciding what flavors to use in my X-Files tea last month, but with this tea I had no such problem. A tea based off The Three Musketeers book HAS to taste like a 3 Musketeers candy bar, right? I’m sure there’s a law about it somewhere. So I combined Adagio’s Tiger’s Eye, Chocolate, and Caramel teas with cocoa nib and cinnamon inclusions to make the ultimate chocolate caramel tea. You’re welcome. 😉
All for One and One for All Tea
A delicious mix of chocolate and caramel with just a touch of cinnamon. Inspired by the candy bar of musketeer fame!
Seriously, guys, this is the tea equivalent of a 3 Musketeers bar, and it’s AWESOME. Tiger’s Eye tea is a chocolate-caramel blend from Adagio, and I used that as my base, adding extra chocolate and caramel flavored teas until I reached the desired balance of the two. Then I kicked it up a notch with cocoa nibs to intensify the chocolate flavor and cinnamon…because cinnamon makes everything better! The final result is rich and sweet, which I think is fitting. With some milk and sugar, it makes a perfect dessert tea!
You knew it was coming. How could a Three Musketeers menu end without a 3 Musketeers bar? Luckily, this recipe (which I originally found here) is super easy to make. There’s a little bit of wait time involved while the filling chills, but the active preparation time is only 5-10 minutes…and there are only two ingredients! When I first tested the recipe, I was a little nervous that it was all too good to be true, but the finished candy bars DEFINITELY taste like the 3 Musketeers bars you buy in the store. 🙂
All for one and one for all! Let’s all eat dessert! 😀
You may remember last August when I shared a post about my very first comic con. In short, it was AWESOME. I had no idea what I was missing out on all this time! This past weekend, I went to an even BIGGER comic book convention, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (or C2E2 for short). I was originally planning on publishing a different post today, but I had such a blast at the con that I decided to scrap my plans and share the geeky wonderfulness of C2E2 with you! 😀
Milady de Winter is one of my all-time favorite literary villains. She’s the sort of cold, evil manipulator that you just love to hate. In fact, she’s such a good bad guy that my favorite chapters in The Three Musketeers are the five chapters she spends in prison doing nothing but scheming. Naturally, such a wonderful villain deserves a spot on our menu.
And given her name, I knew the recipe I made in her honor had to be winter soup!
Since I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe, I had to go hunting for one while planning this menu. This particular winter soup—my own slight variation on one I found by Chungah Rhee–is fragrant and wholesome. I chose it because it includes an extra step that many soup recipes don’t: it calls for roasting the vegetables before adding them to the soup. I think roasting vegetables ALWAYS makes them better, so I had my eye out for a recipe that took advantage of roasted veggie goodness. And this is definitely it! If I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe before, I’ve sure got one now! 😉
St. Patrick’s Day is coming up fast! Luckily, classic lit books (and some modern day classics) offer lots of potential St. Patty’s Day recipes. Here are some of my favorites:
So…if you missed the excitement a couple hours ago, I accidentally published this post a day early while it was still an unfinished draft. AND IT WAS UP FOR A WHOLE HOUR BEFORE I REALIZED IT HAPPENED. * Cue death by embarrassment *
The full story is this: last night when I started drafting the post, I put the wrong date into the schedule bar. So it published at 11 am today…instead of 11 am tomorrow, when it was meant to be all finished and shiny. SOMEONE HIDE ME.
Funny thing is, I NEVER fill out the scheduler until the post is finished. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do it this time.
So after a giant round of panicking, I scrambled to finish editing and uploading my pictures, so subscribers wouldn’t click on the email containing this post and wonder what the heck was going on. EEP. I’m so sorry, guys!
Anyway, I should probably put my shame aside and try to focus on what this post is really about: namely, the Three Musketeers.
Our recipe today is a tribute to my favorite musketeer, Athos. I’ve got a soft spot for prickly characters, and he’s nothing if not stern and stoic. The only time Athos makes an exception to his rule of restraint is when it comes to wine. Athos LOVES him a good burgundy. This is proven when his friends get separated from him for two weeks while traveling, and they find him barricaded into an innkeeper’s cellar, drunk on four casks of wine and guilty of eating most of the innkeeper’s delicious hams.
Reading kit time! These are steadily becoming one of my favorite things to post. I love picking out the most iconic items in a story and hunting down cool versions of them for a kit. And The Three Musketeers has loads! Below you’ll find a list of items you can buy to build an awesome musketeer reading kit for yourself…or your three best friends! So don your feathered cap and get ready for an adventure! 🙂
I just read The Three Musketeers for the first time last year, and I was hugely impressed. Considering the size of the book and the time when it was written, I was expecting it to be a little slow and wordy. Instead, I laughed my way through the first chapter and rooted for D’Artagnan and his musketeer pals all the way to the end. Before the book was over, I knew I had to make a menu for it here on the blog.
Food and books. They’re kinda my thing. So much so that my blog has changed the way I read. Now when I’m reading a book strictly for pleasure that won’t appear on the blog, I still reach for my pencil to make a note when the author mentions food. It’s made me notice a few things, most especially that authors can get really creative in how they use food to forward the story.
