To understand why people like to spice up their sweet stuff, we need to look at why they crave certain foods. My example for this is chile-infused chocolate in all its forms, a combination that goes back to the Mayas, who served it in two forms: as a hot, bitter drink, and sweetened with honey, the original sweetener before the technology to produce sugar from cane was invented. There are three basic reasons we crave sugar. Stress can cause fatigue, but sugar can send waves of energy through the body, and we crave that energy. Diet is the second reason; if you've been following a low-carb or low-fat diet, your body can become resistant to insulin, sending signals to your brain to eat more sweets even though there is plenty of sugar in your blood. And the genetic makeup of your body can be responsible too. If you have a gene called glucose transporter type 2, it triggers the craving for sweets, and there's nothing you can do except resist it if you can. There are also three things that trigger a craving for chocolate.

First is the most obvious: flavor. Chocolate is quite delicious, with excellent mouth-feel, and most people want to repeat the chocolate experience again and again. The second trigger for the craving is the pleasure chocolate gives you. It stimulates serotonin release, which can decrease anxiety and depression. In addition, caffeine and theobromine, both found in chocolate, can give the body a much-needed boost of energy, and anadamine, another substance found in chocolate, may duplicate the effects of marijuana, giving a little "high" to the person consuming it. These six craving triggers are boosted by three more triggers when chiles are mixed with sweetened chocolate. First, if chiles make totally bland foods flavorful, their addition to something delicious like chocolate strengthens the pleasure that chocolate provides, particularly for chileheads. Chiles are also unique, and add a dimension to foods that no other spice provides.

And chile lovers expect their food to be spicy, so they crave chiles when it's not. So chiles increase the cravings for sweet things in general and chocolate in particular. So all we need do to make chile chocolate even more desirable is to simply add one additional ingredient, as we see in our first recipe.