Pudding people love Kozy Shack. While the most popular brand of grocery-store pudding, Jell-O, has an ingredient list containing artificial this and partially hydrogenated that, taking a peek at the back of the Kozy Shack package is mighty reassuring: sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, mostly stuff you'd find in your own kitchen. They all taste great too, better than any cornstarch-glooped thing I've mixed up myself.

I particularly favor the rice pudding and the tapioca pudding. But yesterday as my little girl was making a passionate case for the purchase of a six-pack of puddings in front of the grocery dairy aisle, I spotted a new Kozy Shack flavor: chocolate hazelnut. Bought, brought home, tasted. Oh yeah. Rich, deep chocolate and a beautiful toasted hazelnut flavor, along with a perfect creamy texture. It has a Nutella vibe, but the nut flavor is more toasty-brown. Half the package is already gone.

Kozy Shack Pudding, $3.69 at grocery stores (prices may vary by region)

One of the best things about cooking from books or paper recipes is that you can mark up the recipe as you adapt it to your own tastes. Maybe you replace half the oil in the muffins with applesauce, or you put an extra two cloves of garlic in, or dear God, it's only half a teaspoon of salt, not two tablespoons. Whatever you change, you want to remember it, and one glaring flaw of most of the electronic recipe apps out there is that they don't allow it.

The Recipe Box, a neat, sweet little recipe-keeping iPad app developed by a couple of cooking pals in the San Francisco Bay Area, does. Putting in recipes is a simple cut-and-paste job, or you can type them in. Once the recipe's in, there's a tab for notes, where you can put your variations and experiments. Tidy! Organized!

Another nifty feature: You can organize recipes by any category you choose. Yeah, sure, there are "main dishes" and "desserts," but you can also have "Stuff the Kids Might Eat," "No-Garlic Recipes" (for your grandma—garlic repeats on her), or "Stovetop Recipes" for when your oven's on the fritz.

Recipe Box developer Kathy Tafel says she likes to find recipes when she's "too sleepy to cook" and mark them as "haven't tried this yet" in Recipe Box. "Then, when I'm awake enough to cook again, I have new recipes for inspiration," she says. I dunno, trolling the Interwebs for late-night recipes? Something like that sounds kind of unwholesome. Yet familiar.

The Recipe Box, $6.99

I am something of a candy cane addict, so much so that when I was a child I had a strategic method of stealing canes from the Christmas tree so that my family wouldn't notice for as long as possible (the trick is to keep all the canes spaced out evenly). I'm such a junkie that I'll eat any candy cane, even those tiny ones in plastic that you buy 100 for $3. But the canes from TruSweets are the most delicious I've ever had.

TruSweets canes don't look that great in the box. They're colored with fruit juice so they shine a kind of dull red and dirty white. But the ingredients on the side are choice: real sugar, natural peppermint flavor. No corn syrup! And the taste ... oh my. There is not a trace of the sharp hotness of lesser canes, nor the gumminess that corn syrup imparts. The mint is gentle, pure, and wonderful. The only better gift I could get for Christmas is to have these canes sold year-round.

TruSweets canes are sold at Whole Foods and other natural foods stores for about $3.99 for 10.

Heron and his cider makers, Bruce Nissen and Ryan Aikens, are twisting the cider formula by experimenting with barrel aging and fermenting with alternative yeasts—stuff that was previously only the domain of experimental craft beer brewers. Heron says: "I wanted to do something that a craft beer drinker would find interesting and authentic. Artisanal Reserve are our American balls-to-the-wall, new-world craft ciders. They are done by nobody in the world."

Going the craft beer route seems to be working for Heron: Crispin was available in four states in 2009, and is now in almost 30. Currently, the Artisanal Reserve series has three ciders in it: Honey Crisp, The Saint, and Lansdowne. While many ciders use concentrate, these are made from fresh juice mainly from Granny Smith, Washington, and Golden apples. "You wouldn't drink grape wine from grape concentrate," says Heron. The ciders are also unfiltered, which gives them a little more body and a slightly cloudy look.

Honey Crisp is made with honey (duh), and was the first of the experimental line. In the glass it looks really light, like lemon juice—surprising when you first see it. While it's definitely sweet (you're probably not going to get a double-IPA-swilling hop-head beer geek into it), it's not cloying at all, and has a shockingly clean finish. It's lightly carbonated, and tastes like something you could drink as an apéritif or just on its own. The apple is there, but it doesn't have that synthetic Sour Apple Pucker smell that some ciders do.

"Once the Honey Crisp took off," says Heron, "we got so excited and started asking ourselves, 'What will we do next?' We said we'd do a maple syrup one. We wanted to do a big, ballsy Honey Crisp, and it came out terrible. It was just horrible. That's when we started playing around with novel yeasts." That led to The Saint, a cider brewed with Trappist yeast and maple syrup. It's sweeter than the Honey Crisp, but also more complex: You pick up on the flavors the yeast imparts, but it's very subtle compared to a Trappist ale, with just a hint of funkiness and spiciness from the maple. "We were told by some consultants that we were crazy to try it," says Heron, who was born in South Africa. "My response was, 'In America you can do whatever you want. Your only failure is lack of trying.'"

In September, Heron added Lansdowne (pictured in the glass above) to the series, a cider brewed with dark Irish stout yeast and molasses. This one is the color of an amber ale, way darker than the other two, with a definite molasses smell and flavor and some spicy flavors as well—wintry where the other two are light and summery. At the end of October, The Jacket, a limited-edition blend of four ciders (including one that was wild-fermented) and Gravenstein apple juice, aged in Jack Daniel's barrels, is scheduled for release.

Right now cider is less than 1 percent of the beer market. "More people drink nonalcoholic beer!" says Heron, who admits he didn't even drink cider before getting into the business. His modest goal for Crispin's future: "I would like to get a salary someday; that would be awesome."

The wine-rating-and-buying site Snooth released an iPhone app recently, allowing wine enthusiasts to search for wine, find nearby stores, and compare prices. It's fun to play around with, but the idiosyncrasies of wine searches online are not yet solved. And I still don't know what goes with artichokes.

The $4.99 version includes a tool called Snapshots: Take a photo of a wine label, and the app will identify it and price it for you, allowing you to find out where to buy it, save it to a wish list, or identify it as a wine you have in your cellar. (The free, ad-supported version doesn't include the Snapshots feature.) It works pretty well; it almost always identified the wine label, if not the varietal.

The wine searching feature isn't perfect. Will it ever be possible to search for wine effectively? You can identify color, price range, country of origin, some flavor profiles, or varietals. A search for red, spicy, and earthy under $8 turned up an M. Chapoutier Crozes-Hermitages Petite Ruche 2007. Great, I can get it for $4.95! If I'm in Wien, Austria. So I re-sort the list by distance instead of price, and the wine is suddenly nowhere near under $8—more like $25. One reviewer says "really good value for what you pay," but is that referring to the $4.95 Chapoutier or the $25?

BTW, Snooth: There's a typo on your iPhone app. I don't really want to search for desert wines (would prefer water in that case, please).

Am I the only one who remembers those puffed-up round mint candies they used to sell at drugstores? It looked like they took a regular Starlight Mint and, um, did something to it, turning it into a crunchy-crumbly little mint ball? Anyhoo, haven't been able to find them in 30 years or more, which is why I got superexcited over this image of the Nostalgia Electrics Hard Candy and Sugar Free Cotton Candy Maker, which clearly emphasizes that you can take Starlight Mints (or whatever hard candy you happen to like) and turn them into spun-sugar floss. Yay!

Sugar-free candy can apparently also be used. I don't want to think too much about that though.

Nostalgia Electrics Hard Candy and Sugar Free Cotton Candy Maker, $49.95

ThinkGeek, lately praised by us for its Star Trek pizza cutter, continues its headlong march into kitchen drollery with the Knife Fridge Magnet, which totally looks like you stuck a knife into your fridge, without the damage, ruined knives, or family members standing around in mute horror. Not entirely sure what's thoughtful or geeky about sticking faux cutlery onto fridges, but the overall effect is pretty great.

Why not leave it sticking threateningly out of your grocery lists? "Buy peanut butter, pancake mix, Tampax, and bread OR YOU DIE!"

Knife Fridge Magnet, $9.99

OK, that headline is a total red herring. If you're looking to make your own fancy chocolate, with tempering and pretty toppings, well, Google can probably help with that. But for a really simple DIY chocolate bar, try Chocri. It's like a digital salad bar!

They've made it ridiculously easy. You do it all on the website: Designate the type of chocolate (milk, dark, white, or milk and white combined) then pick your toppings. You pay for the chocolate base (from $5.50), then per topping, from 20 cents for a sprinkling of fleur de sel to $2.10 for gold flakes. Choose from fruits, spices, nuts, confections (like rice crispies or toffee), decor (a marzipan rose, or writing, like "happy birthday"), and grains (no, not farro; grains means things like candied lilac or the requisite bacon bits).

All in all, there are countless combinations. You could make a baroque bar: dark chocolate with candied rose petals, gold flakes, silver pearls, pistachios, fleur de sel, and goji berries. As you can imagine, some of these will get pricey. But they also have more sane recommendations in case the choices just overwhelm.

ThinkGeek, source of many clever and/or deeply nerd-influenced tchotchkes, presents the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter, which cuts pizza while looking exactly like the NCC-1701, no doubt boldly, etc. etc.

I love snacking on nuts. People complain, "But nuts are so fatty!" Yeah, I guess so. But then, so is your $6 crappuccino frothamocha, and I don't mock you over that, do I? Wait, I just did. Anyhoo, why not go for broke and snack not just on fatty nuts, but on fatty nuts frosted with sweet, sweet honey and tangy orange essence? Oh, are these ever good. The almonds are ultrafresh and crunchy, lightly roasted so they offer nice chewy resistance to the tooth. The honey flavor is fresh and buttery, not cloying; the orange has the delicate bouquet of orange blossoms. Heaven.

Rodin is in Modesto, California, and offers scores of other flavored nut varieties on its website; it also runs stands at farmers' markets all over Northern California. Orange honey is my favorite, but other people crave the butter toffee and the chili and lemon.

Rodin Orange Honey Almonds, $6 for 11 ounces

We are really digging food52's latest website addition, foodpickle, a real-time food help line. Just send questions to @foodpickle on Twitter, and you get back responses from a community of cooks. Questions and answers also get posted to the foodpickle page on the site, and there is already an interesting wiki of food knowledge shaping up. But there is an unanswered stumper lingering: How does one prepare the fruit of the kousa dogwood tree? Chowhounds, is it edible?

So they wouldn't really have had cups like these back in Mad Men times, because in the early ’60s, coffee came in tiny little eight-ounce cups that were, by law, white. No one had ever thought of pouring an avalanche of cream and sugar into one's cup and calling it coffee; it was strong and hot and perked so bitter it could take the shine off a car's paint job. And they liked it that way, by golly!

Where were we? Oh yes, these cups. They do have a bit of ’60s style thanks to the happy pastel graphics (those shades of pink and turquoise are a dead era giveaway), but they're huge enough to hold my modern-sized drink. And they'll look cool with my gold pen necklace.

Christmas a la Mod glasses, $15 each (available in October)

Pregnant women have to drink so much water that it just gets boring. You're looking for anything—anything!—to jazz water up. My friend puts a dash of Peychaud's bitters in homemade soda water. A good one, although I'm not sure she's run it by her doctor. But if you'd rather play it safe, consider a new beverage called Ayala's Herbal Water.

I was sent three bottles in the mail as a sample, and happily drank them all in a day. The sparkling water has zero calories and no sweetener, and it's been flavored with things like cinnamon, orange peel, lemongrass, mint, vanilla, and lavender. Unlike Metro Water and a lot of other flavored water products I've tried, these don't taste like mouthwash, but rather are restrained and more aromatic. Sort of like tea, but water. They come in plastic single-serving-size bottles, or 25.4-ounce frosted glass bottles that are dinner party–suitable. And of course, you don't have to be pregnant to enjoy them. But it's nice to have them if you are.

There are so many talented bartenders on the West Coast that I'm surprised it took this long for someone to capitalize on them and make a book. But Ted Munat and Michael Lazar just did, with their slick little book Left Coast Libations.

If you are living and drinking fancy cocktails in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver, it feels a little like being given a secret decoder ring for the high-end cocktail scene, and it's also fun (and a little voyeuristic) to read the mini-profiles on the 51 bartenders. But this is definitely an advanced recipe book for serious cocktail geeks, full of gastriques, foams, smoked air, and kumquat marmalade.

At a release party for the book last night, I spoke to bartender Ryan Fitzgerald for a few minutes as he mixed up a batch of Rocky Mountain Monkberry and made wisecracks when someone trying to take his photo complained that bartenders are always looking down. The drink introduced me to the liqueur brand Leopold Brothers, out of Denver. It makes fruit liqueurs that take about three pounds of fruit per bottle, and you can taste it—it's nothing like that garbage Pucker Berry Fusion or other cheap candy-colored liqueur. The downside: It goes off fast. Fitzgerald says it needs to be refrigerated or it'll lose flavor. I tasted a little of the off stuff too, and well, even that was still pretty good. But it definitely had less of the berries-smashed-into-your-face freshness. Check out his simple three-ingredient recipe featuring it below.

Left Coast Libations, $24.95

Leopold Brothers Rocky Mountain blackberry liqueur, $31.99

Rocky Mountain Monkberry by Ryan Fitzgerald (pictured)

adapted from Left Coast Libations

2 ounces Rittenhouse 100-proof rye (Wild Turkey 101-proof rye is a good substitute)

1/2 ounce Benedictine

1/2 ounce Leopold Brothers Rocky Mountain blackberry liqueur

Broad lime twist, for garnish

Stir all the ingredients except lime twist with ice. Strain into a chilled, small cocktail glass. Garnish with the lime twist, twisting it over the drink before serving.

Photo by Jenn Farrington 2010

The stock-in-trade at the Etsy shop of the, um, aptly named Leapinchubb is aprons. Specifically, aprons fitted with faux phalluses (phalli?) that are disturbingly real-looking, covered up with a tea towel sewn to the waist. Keep the towel down and you look like any average cook in an apron, though maybe a little bumpier than usual. Lift it up, and you've got laughter. Or something.

As Leapinchubb herself says, "The oversized penis is made from a nylon stocking and has pubic hair in the obvious areas! It is truely hilarious!" Truely hilarious, Leapinchubb. Truely.

Penis Apron, $25

British company True Utility makes stuff like heavy-duty LED flashlights and mini multipurpose tools that clip on your key ring. Now, they claim they make the world's smallest fully functional corkscrew, called a Twistick, too. While I always find it questionable to have drinking accessories attached to your car keys, this looks like it would be perfect for backpacking.

Twistick, about $7.66

One of the reasons it might be such a unique cookbook is that it wasn't put out by a cookbook publisher. O'Reilly Media is behind it, a company that publishes books on C++ programming, JavaScript, and server administration. But I swear, Cooking for Geeks is not boring. It lays out the how and whys of everything from basics like cooking eggs to using modern molecular gastronomy ingredients like agar to make "rum screwdriver gel" (a.k.a. über Jell-O shots) and transglutaminase to bond together bacon and scallops. People with short attention spans needn't worry: It doesn't read like either a cookbook or a textbook. Instead, it's a mix of recipes, interviews, charts, graphs, tables, and factoids that keeps you turning pages.

Now, if only there was a Dungeons & Dragons cookbook in the wings. Hold up, there is. In fact, it looks like all the good dork-themed cookbooks have already been done. Four more to geek out on:

Wookiee Cookies: A Star Wars Cookbook (Tusken Raider Taters, Yoda Soda)

Hellbent for Cooking: The Heavy Metal Cookbook (Candied Sweetbreads on a Bed of Seared Heart, Viking Testicle cocktail)

The Star Trek Cookbook (Klingon Blood Pie, Antarian Glow Water)

The Lord of the Rings Cookbook ("all of the meals eaten by Bilbo and the dwarves on their journey to Erebor")

What would happen if a utilitarian stainless-steel serving spoon, fancy heirloom silver, and a couple of hand tools were hybridized into one mutant serving utensil? I'll tell you what: a fancy new designer spoon, slotted spoon, and serving fork. They are on the pricey side, at $35 a pop more than a hundred bucks for a set of three, but they look good. Each piece is available in three colors: white, mustard yellow, and orange (paging 1976!).

My only qualm besides the price tag: They need a hole in the handle to hang them on the wall. If I'm paying $35 for cool serving pieces, I don't want to shove them in the back of a drawer.

Superior Servers, $35 each

A fascinating book just showed up at CHOW HQ called What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets. The big coffee table photo book profiles 80 people's eating habits for a day, showing snapshots of them next to what they eat, but also delves deeper into who they are, how they get their food, how they prepare it, and how many calories they consume. The authors, Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, did a similar project a few years ago, documenting photographically what they purchase to eat in a week. This book is more personal, and it's hard to stop looking it.

There is Xu Zhipeng, the "Extreme Gamer" from China (1,600 calories a day) who lives in an Internet café in Shanghai and receives his meals via delivery. A Namibian trucker whose cans of food, a couple bags of chips, and three Red Bulls don't seem like they could really add up to 8,400 calories a day. An Italian friar in Rome who's living well on 4,000 calories a day including 12 ounces of wine at lunch and dinner.

It would be a great gift. Even if someone isn't into food, the social, economic, and political implications of the photos are riveting.

What I Eat, retail $40

If you ever wanted to brew at San Francisco's Magnolia, work at Chez Panisse for a day, or be invited to taste-test at the next Delfina restaurant project before it opens, now is your chance. But it'll cost you. Right now, there are 33 food-experience-related auctions on eBay that benefit La Cocina, the San Francisco–based nonprofit that helps people get their food businesses off the ground.

This Saturday, La Cocina is also hosting the second annual SF Street Food Festival, which promises to have "7 times the space and 4 times the vendors" compared to last year's supercrowded festival. Vendors will be selling both booze (cocktails from Rye on the Road) and food (Curry Up Now).

The auctions close August 26, so get crackin'. And try to resist the pervy bachelor/bachelorette auction jokes.

Image source: Flickr member walknboston under Creative Commons