The Chocolate-Chai Grilled Mascarpone Sandwich

I'm making dinner tonight for my fellow grad students in the creative nonfiction program at the University of Pittsburgh. I went to the hardware store, the supermarket, and the Moroccan-imports store yesterday. I have an entire shoulder of pork, which I'm brining in a bucket (from the hardware store), rubbing with sage and garlic, and basting with apple cider and brown sugar. I have gin, vermouth, olives, a new set of Moroccan martini glasses (really, tea glasses adapted for my purposes), and a lit-blogging colleague with the qualifications of a 1950s-era bar-mistress. But the only thing I'm making for dessert is a batch of chocolate macaroons, with a recipe from my perennially-out-of-season Australian Seasonal Produce Diary. Do my readers (and perhaps my guests) expect more? About a year ago, I promised that I would test and reproduce a chocolate recipe once a week! Once a month, on good months, has turned out to be more realistic. To tell the truth, I'm tired of chocolate. Or, more accurately, I'm just tired. I'm a grad student!

However, in between grading papers, revising, reprinting, and rereading one of my own essays about seventeen times, and trying to figure out when the hell to do my dishes, I did invent a novel afternoon chocolate indulgence: the chocolate-chai grilled mascarpone sandwich. It does for me what the peanut butter and banana combo did for Elvis.

Recipe:
Chocolate-Chai Grilled Mascarpone Sandwhich

Half of a Theo or Dagoba chai-infused chocolate bar
Two or three tablespoons of mascarpone cheese
Two slices of white or whole-wheat sandwich bread
Butter

Spread the mascarpone on one slice of bread and top it with the chocolate and the second slice of bread. Melt a knob of butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat. Place the sandwich, mascarpone-side-down, in the pan and cook for about four minutes, until the bread is toasty. Pick up the sandwich with a spatula, melt just another sliver of butter in the pan, and flip the sandwich into the pan so that the chocolate side is down. Cook the sandwich for about two minutes, until the second side of bread is toasty. Remove the sandwich from the pan and let it sit for two minutes. Cut it in half. Eat.