Belated Birthday Dessert - Eclipse Chocolat

[Marathon posting session - Scroll down for the newest 3 posts]

After our awesome lunch at Que Huong, we went over my dessert choices. Extraordinary Desserts downtown? Chocolat Cremerie in Hillcrest, Heaven Sent Desserts in North Park or Eclipse Chocolat on El Cajon? We've been to ED and HS, and didn't want to deal with the shitty parking downtown or  even worse parking in Hillcrest for that matter. We'd all been to HD before but not everyone had been to Eclipse, where parking wasn't that much of a hassle and we knew it wouldn't be crowded. So, Eclipse it was.

D and KD looking at the dessert case. The shelf on the left had different kinds of in-house made chocolate bars infused with herbs, fruits, nuts and/or spices. One of my favorites is the Dark Chocolate with Moroccan spices.

That's TORC looking at the other display case...hmmmm, what to order?

We had our eyes on these...these are like huge chunks of chocolate with nuts and other stuff in it...

Some of their cupcake offerings. If you click on the photo to make it larger, you can make out what the placards say...

They ended up treating me to my choice which was the Sea-Salted Caramel cupcake covered with dark chocolate ganache and topped with lavender flecked sea salt. I've had it before and I was craving it again.

And more cupcakes...

Loved the seating here, but we ended up sitting at the table to the right (not pictured) with a great window view.

Now we also came here with the idea that they'd still be serving their Seasonal Dessert Platter, which in the past, was four different types of desserts for only $12. Unfortunately, they no longer offered it because it wasn't that popular. So, we ended up choosing 4-5 different things so we could share them among ourselves.

Here's D's choice,  the Sea Salt Nib Rococo - which had Marcona almonds (which the owner buys from Costco, I know - I've seen the cans), marshmallows and cocoa nibs within. The cool guy working the counter sliced it up for us. I really liked this, even more than my own dessert choice.,

Someone ordered the Bread Pudding - which was croissants with chocolate inside and a scoop of ice cream on top. I don't know about you but I don't like mixing hot and cold with my desserts. I especially dislike drippy melted ice cream on anything except an ice cream cone. That's not to say this was not a good dessert; on the contrary, it was. I just didn't like the hot and cold combo. I'm not an 'a la mode' kind of chick.

This was TORC's choice - the Muscovado  Caramel cupcakes which is topped with Muscovado sugar over dark chocolate ganache, hiding a nice caramel filling.

Here's all four desserts together, and a fork in action.

I ordered the iced passion fruit green tea...the other drinks were Earl Grey tea and some sort of coffee drink on the right. Yeah, really descriptive there. KD's coffee came with a really cute and tiny thimble sized cup for her cream!

Here's a cross section of my Sea Salt Caramel, you can see the lavender on top...

This was the Muscovado Caramel cupcake...

Wait! There's more! D ordered another item (forgot the name of it), but basically it was like a sweet cinammon roll but smaller than those mongo Cinnabon types. The icing was kind of cold. It probably would have tasted better warm.

Before we left, I bought a Peanut Butter and Banana cupcake for Bert and TC to share. The filling was peanut butter (Bert's fave flavor). The bananas on top were those sweetened dried kind you can probably get at Trader Joe's or the Henry's bulk bin.

Here's our desserts after we laid waste to them...

Take a gander at D's beautiful bracelet which was a gift from her mom in the Philippines. I love how each semiprecious stone is a different color and there are different shapes (rectangle, square, oval, heart). Very lovely!

Here's us cool chicks...

I'll have to do a separate post about one of my gifts since it was so RAD...It was a book called "Musical Listography" from TORC and it's like the best book ever! Every page is blank with a topic that you fill in like "Songs to Play at your Funeral" or "Songs that You Hate" or "Songs to Break Up to", etc...Those song lists would be great topics for future posts!

The next birthday in our group isn't until August, but we are still planning on doing our regular lunches or dinners during our summer vacation!