Here’s a list of 20 sugary blogs guaranteed to satisfy your sweet tooth that celebrate the world of cakes, candy, chocolate, ice cream, cup cakes, and other good (if somewhat guilt inducing) eats.

As Don Kardong once said, “Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos.”

Here’s our list, in alphabetical order…

Blognut

Ah donuts. As someone who’s spent more than their fair share of time haunting various donut shops up and down the East coast and drinking gallons of coffee, Blognut is definitely my go-to site for all things donut-centric. Boston cream or French crullers, anyone?

Cake Spy

Covering the world of baked goods with articles on such topics as how not to make chocolate chip cookies, exploring the historical difference between cake and gateau, as well as travels to baked good meccas in such places as Philadelphia, Seattle, New York, and the Jersey shore, the Cake Spy blog is also sprinkled with Jessie Oleson’s delightfully whimsical sketches of cupcakes visiting the circus and the Chrysler Building.

Cake Wrecks

Whatever you do, don’t visit this site while you’re at work unless you want to be caught laughing at cakes with hilariously inappropriate designs, unfortunate misspellings, frightful frosting, and much worse.

If you’d like to read more about the joys of Cake Wrecks, we’ve covered it all here.

Candy Addict

As you might suspect, Candy Addict is a very comprehensive blog about candy, with reviews of such nostalgic candies as Boston Baked Beans to newer confections as pomegranate flavored Tootsie Pops, Reeses Hazelnut Creme, Chocolate Creme de Menthe Altoids, and the truly terrifying Chum Bucket Mints.

Candy From Strangers

Currently in Grenada, after three years of saving up for the trip, blog author Malena travels the world sampling sweets and sharing what she’s seen. Part travelogue and part candy review site, this blog offers an interesting look at international candies and the countries that make them.

Cannelle et Vanille

With its sensual photographs and quality writing, Cannelle et Vanille offers a sophisticated exploration of the many delights of baked goods as well as the techniques and ingredients necessary to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Charmaine’s Pastry Blog

Former ophthalmologist turned pastry cook Charmaine shares her passion for all things pastry as well as her adventures in cake decorating here.

Cheesecake Recipes

Since my wife and I are originally from the New York area, it’s no wonder that we’d be more than happy to eat cheesecake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The new Cheesecake Recipes blog could be the first step in finding inspiration towards making that dream happen.

Chocablog

Care to debate the merits of Belgian chocolate over Swiss, compare the offerings of Lindt, Ghirardelli, Godiva, and Isis to those from Cadbury, Nestle, and Hershey? You’re just one click away from the perfect place to do just that.

Cookie Madness

Double trouble potato chip cookies? Peanut butter and chipotle cookies? Ricotta cheese and Wheaties cookies? All this and more can be found on this blog that mainly focuses on the sharing of cookie recipes.

A Daily Scoop

If it’s made of ice cream, the folks at A Daily Scoop review, announce, and discuss it.

Dessert Buzz

If you have a sweet tooth and are planning a trip to NYC you might want to hit this site first so you don’t miss out on any treats when you tour the Big (candied) Apple.

Dessert First

As Ernestine Ulmer said, “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.” Apparently, the creators of this site couldn’t agree more, with their emphasis on the sweetest meal of the day. Don’t miss their post about and recipe for Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream.

How to Eat a Cup Cake

Each week, the readers of How to Eat a Cup Cake vote for which cupcake recipe from the book Cupcake Heaven gets featured and made on the blog. This week’s winner: Crystal Light Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes.

Japanese Ice Cream

From the title of this blog it’s easy to get an idea what the Japanese Ice Cream site is about, but have you ever tried those delicious red bean, green tea, and black sesame flavored ice creams lurking in the coolers of your local Asian food market? If not, you should.

Kitchen Cakes

With recipes for such down-home favorites as peach cobbler, oatmeal raisin bars, and chocolate rum cake, this blog is a comfort food compendium of recipes from the sweeter side of life.

Peanut Butter Boy

While not strictly speaking a sweets-only blog, how could we not list a blog in which every post and recipe features peanut butter in a starring role?

Sugar Plum

Sugar Plum likes it sweet. From Chocolate Macadamia Coconut Pie to Rainier Cherry and Crumb Crostata to such delights as Buttermilk Frozen Custard With Bourbon Roasted Peaches and Brown Sugar Walnuts Emiline’s definitely not afraid to explore the sensual side of working with fresh ingredients.

Sugar Savvy

A true sugar lovers blog, this site is junk food central, full of reviews of new and old favorites from the candy and ice cream aisles.

Sweet and Simple Bakes

If you’re just getting started out with baking, this is the site for you. With monthly baking blog roundups, this site is an excellent way to find the inspiration and motivation one needs to just off one’s cookie sheet and start baking with confidence.

Ever attend a wedding or birthday party where you couldn’t help noticing that something was a little (or a lot) wrong with the cake they were serving? Then you’ll enjoy Cake Wrecks, a blog that showcases some of the worst looking, most visually unfortunate, and thematically tasteless professionally made cakes we’ve ever seen.

Here’s a sampling of a few of the confectionery monstrosities you’ll find at Cake Wrecks…

1. The Spinning Cake of Goo

2. Say it With Meat

How about some cakes guaranteed to cast a pall over your special day:

• The Unfortunate Wedding Cake
• The I Just Saved You a Doctor’s Visit Cake
• The I Cannot Lie, Even Though It’s Your Birthday Cake

Ow my eyes…here’s 2 cakes that only a Medusa could love:

• Please Put on Sunglasses Before Viewing This Cake
• Keep Those Sunglasses On…I Mean It!

Here’s two cakes that are so ugly and disgusting that I can’t show you a preview photo on this site for fear of permanently killing your appetite. Click at your own risk:

• Icky Cake #1
• Even Ickier Cake #2

We’ll end with a pair of cakes that I can’t help liking…two puffer fish themed cakes:

(Photo Credits: All photos courtesy of Cake Wrecks)

Just how addicted to coffee are you? Do you ever wish you could be permanently hooked up to a coffee I.V.? (If so, see the cartoon to the right.)

What about using coffee as a homemade beauty treatment to firm and tone the skin? (Supposedly you can.) Do you have Starbucks Finder installed on your handheld PDA so you can get your fix anywhere you go?

Then cooking with coffee is the next step in your addiction cycle.

Beyond tiramisu and other obvious coffee flavored desserts, coffee and/or espresso can be used to make a wide variety of interesting marinades, rubs, and sauces. If you’ve ever known the deep pleasure of eating country ham and red-eye gravy, you’re already well on your way to enjoying coffee as a culinary enhancement.

Here’s a few main meal recipes featuring coffee as an ingredient:

• Steak in Indonesian-Java Marinade from Kate’s Global Kitchen

• Charred Buffalo Medallions with Coffee BBQ Sauce from The Food Network

• Grilled Pork Chops with Coffee Barbecue Sauce from About.Com Home Cooking

• Chicken And Coffee Barbecue Sauce from Cooking With Gourmet Coffee

• Coffee Glazed Roast Leg of Lamb from CooksRecipes.Com

• Beef Short Ribs & Coffee, Ancho and Cinnamon Sauce from VisualRecipes.Com

By the way, it is said that French writer Honore de Balzac drank up to 40 strong cups of coffee a day. He went on to write 92 novels and his essay, The Pleasures and Pain of Coffee, gives one a fascinating/horrifying glimpse of his all-too-caffeinated life.

As Balzac goes on to write in the essay…

“For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of (creative) stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.

For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.

When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he’d been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.”

Balzac died at the age of 51. Ironically enough, Ebook Takeaway offers 51 of his books that you can download free of charge here. There’s also some great coffee trivia here as well as Food & Wine’s Obsessive Guide to Coffee.

And you thought your food bill was crazy! Find out more about…

The Most Expensive Junk Foods in the World (CNNMoney.Com)
$120 truffle burgers, $1000 gold leaf ice cream sundaes, and more!

The Most Expensive Restaurants in the U.S. (Forbes)
Dinner averages $366 per person at NYC sushi hotspot Masa. Other restaurants on the list include The French Laundry and Charlie Trotter’s.

The World’s Most Expensive Foods (Wacky Archives)
(Believe it or not, if you’ve ever been to a restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ve eating something with at least a tiny bit of at least one of these ingredients during your lifetime.)

Check out these two YouTube parody videos from MadTV that hilariously skewer the cooking shows we all know and love.

3 Minute Meal: Tuna Melts

3 Minute Meal: Banana Splits

Since St. Patrick’s Day has just passed, we thought this would be a good time to highlight a few interesting foodie records from The Guinness Book of World Records, makers of Guinness Beer (of course!).

Largest Tiramisu

Largest Slab of Fudge

Largest Omelette

Largest Sandwich

Largest Stir-Fry

Longest Line of Pizzas

Most Spoons Dangled From the Face

and, from our archives, The Hottest Chili Pepper in the World.

Looking to add a bit of visual wit and whimsy to your kitchen? Animal House and Boston Warehouse make a huge line of fun kitchen tools, gadgets, and implements that can add a light touch to any serious kitchen.

For a closer look and more information about each gadget, just click on the colorful thumbnails below. We’ve seen these in person at Target and online at Amazon.com.

After the jump, are the lyrics to Seafood Mama, a fun retro song celebrating the joys of seafood from The Andrews Sisters, courtesy of Lyrics007.Com. (If you want to hear the song, just check out our new Southern Coastal Life MP3 Playlist…it’s the 6th song from the top.)
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Here’s some more fun food related items to enjoy…

• Crocheted Ice Cream Cones by Melbangel

• Bagel and Cream Cheese Dollhouse Food by She Counts Crows

• NYC Ceramic Takeout Coffee Cup by NYfirst.com

• Chili Pepper Mousepad by Make Fun Crafts

• Stained Glass Pickles in a Jar by Interior Glass Designs