Chocolate for breakfast

Eating chocolate for breakfast is both decadent and delicious. Better yet: it may even be good for you. Fine Cooking just tweeted the delicious chocolate-hazelnut waffles with a Frangelico-brown butter syrup pictured above. But that is far from the only breakfast food you can find that prominently features chocolate. Kevin Lynch of Closet Cooking adds beer to the equation with these bacon Guinness chocolate pancakes pictured right.

The notion of chocolate for breakfast dates back to the ancient Mayans, who were among the first to utilize cacao beans as food. They formed ground cacao it into an unsweetened, frothy drink, sometimes mixed with maize and made into a sort of gruel, that was consumed at all times of day. George Washington, a founding father of the United States, drank hot chocolate for breakfast. French recipes for a version of pain au chocolat can be found as early as the 1800s. Since then, chefs across the globe have found new ways of incorporating chocolate into the most important meal of the day. Be inspired by these other chocolate-enriched breakfast delicacies from the EYB library:

Honey-Cured bacon, Stilton, and chocolate sandwich
Welsh pancakes with a leek-mushroom sauce
Chocolate porridge
Lemony olive oil banana bread with chocolate chips
Chocolate-banana smoothie
Nutella French toast
Banana and green tea milk chocolate muffins
Whole wheat chocolate raspberry baked donuts
Petits pains au chocolate
Orange and dark chocolate buttermilk scones

Photos courtesy of finecooking.com and closetcooking.com