Cupcake enthusiasts, rejoice: Sweet! by Good Golly Miss Holly lives up to its name, and it's definitely worth the trip to Orlando.

The dessert shop features a wide variety of gourmet cupcakes, with unique flavors like cinnamon swirl, chocolate strawberry and cherry jubilee. Those with less adventurous taste buds will delight in choices like red velvet, a cupcake covered with cream cheese frosting, or black out, a mouth-watering chocolate concoction topped with frosting and chocolate vermicelli sprinkles.

Sweet! by Good Golly Miss Holly

Where: Waterford Lakes Town Center, 711 N Alafaya Trail, Orlando
 
Hours: 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday

Miscellaneous: Free Wi-fi is available.

Phone: 407-277-7746

Website: www.sweetbyholly.com

(Photo provided by Max Friedman) 

I admit it: when it comes to making cookies, I'm usually a chocolate chip cookie kind of girl. I swear by the Alton Brown Chewy recipe, and it takes a lot of persuasion for me to make snickerdoodles or sugar cookies instead.

But the other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a recipe for white chocolate chocolate cookies, and I was instantly intrigued. Two mentions of chocolate in a single recipe title? Any chocolate lover worth her salt knows that extra chocolate is never a bad thing, so I decided to give it a try. The final result was a soft, moist chocolate cookie with white chocolate chips buried inside every bite. I'll definitely be making these again. Grade: A plus. 

 Photo Credit: Peter Bauer 

Do you remember your first brownie? I do. It was soft and fudgy, a little slice of chocolatey perfection courtesy of a Betty Crocker mix, and so shamelessly delicious that I promptly ate three in a row.

Ever since that fateful introduction, the hunt has been on. Some people search for the perfect pizza. My personal culinary quest is to track down the perfect brownie.  

Fortunately, technology has made my epic search a little easier. Thanks to Google and various cooking websites, I've found every kind of brownie imaginable---from black bean brownies to thousand dollar brownies to peppermint patty brownies. Everyone has their own variation of America's long cherished dessert, but no one seems to know who came up with it. Some say that the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer held the first recipe; others argue that a housewife in Bangor, Maine, neglected to add baking powder to her chocolate cake and decided to serve the failed dessert in flat slices instead of throwing it away. 

I haven't found the perfect, melt-in-your mouth brownie recipe quite yet, but here are a few favorites worth mentioning:

Alton Brown's Cocoa Brownies  

Peanut Butter Brownies

Chocolate Chip Cookie-Topped Brownies

And of course, the recipe I've been developing myself the last couple of years (pictured right). It's not perfect -- not yet anyway, but it comes pretty darn close.

Here's the recipe:

Fudge Brownies with White Chocolate and Pecans

18 tablespoons of butter

2 cups of white sugar

1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoons unsweetened dark cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 large eggs

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup of chocolate chips

1/2 cup of white chocolate chips

1 cup of chopped pecans 

powdered sugar
 
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and spray an 8 by 8 pan with some cooking spray.   

In a medium pot, combine butter, sugar, cocoa powder. Over a low cooking heat, stir the mixture occasionally until it's smooth. Remove from heat and add the vanilla and the eggs. Stir in the flour. Once the batter is thick and well mixed, add in the regular chocolate chips, the white chocolate chips and pecans.

Pour the batter into the pan and spread evenly. Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes(depending on how gooey you like your brownies, the shoter cooking time the gooier).

Garnish with powdered sugar and pecans.