We could kiss you for asking! We routinely get requests for recipes for Death by Chocolate. Certainly there was once an original Death by Chocolate dessert, served up in some restaurant by some creative pastry chef. It may have been Marcel Desaulniers, executive chef of the Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., and author of Death By Chocolate (Canada, UK) and host of a TV series of the same name. But it may be that he was just capitalizing on a clever title.

We have not been able to track down the history of the original, and the search is complicated by the fact that there are also dessert sauces, cookies, candies, and a dessert restaurant chain in New Zealand that also share the name. We suppose Desaulnier’s recipe is probably considered the standard.

There are dozens and dozens of DBC recipes all over the Internet (most using cake mixes, which presumably most restaurants do not). If you order Death by Chocolate in some restaurant, there is no telling what you are going to get, but it will be sweet, chocolaty, rich, most likely quite gooey, and, we hope, delicious. If you like it and want the recipe, ask for it on the spot, because you’re not likely to find it prepared the same way anywhere else.