Great Gift Alert!: The Best Purchased Chocolate Sauce I've Ever Tasted

Sunday Night Premium Dessert Sauces are voluptuous sauces … and more: They can also serve as recipes starters for epic desserts, from brownies and cream pie to a gorgeous French tart.

Breaking news from Amerique profonde (deep America—what the French call the American heartland):

A new food company in Des Moines, Iowa, has recently launched what I honestly think is the best purchased chocolate sauce I’ve ever had in my life—anywhere. I’ve just ordered a bunch of jars of for this year’s gift-giving.

Sunday Night Sauces come in three versions (Dark + Decadent, Dark Chocolate + Sea Salt, and Sweet + Rich). Eileen Gannon, the founder of the company, is dedicated to using only high-quality ingredients: sugar, heavy cream, butter, unsweetened chocolate (premium Guittard chocolate, no less), Dutch process cocoa, vanilla, and salt. No stabilizers, preservatives, or artificial flavors allowed. And no corn syrup.

The silky-glossy sauces are astoundingly good—as elegant as they are decadent. They’re prefect for topping French desserts from crêpes to profiteroles to fancy gåteaux.

The filling for this Chocolate Tart, from the Sunday Night Foods website, requires just two ingredients. An egg and a jar of Sunday Night Sauce. Get the recipe.

But they’re also more than a dessert sauce. Consider these sauces high-end convenience products that can jump-start your baking. Add powdered sugar, and the sauce becomes a frosting. With milk and cornstarch, it becomes an absolutely amazing filling for a chocolate cream pie (I’ve done it, and I’ll be doing it again soon).

The Sunday Night Foods website offers of dozens of recipes, chocolate stout cakelets and chocolate-filled oatmeal bars to brownies, tarts, fudge-filled cookies and more. French-food lovers will especially appreciate the Sunday Night Chocolate Tart, with its two-ingredient filling. (I’ve not yet tried this recipe, but given the A+ results of the chocolate cream pie I did try, I’m willing to bet the tart is divine.)

So, Who Is Eileen Gannon?

I think you’ll soon be hearing a lot about Eileen Gannon and her Sunday Night Sauces.

I consider Eileen Gannon the Herb and Kathy Eckhouse of chocolate sauces. Herb and Kathy came out of nowhere (i.e. Amerique profound) and totally turned heads in the food world with their La Quercia Prosciutto; Eileen is doing the exact same thing with her Sunday Night sauces.

Until recently, Eileen held high-powered day jobs at Morgan Stanley and later Workiva (a publicly traded tech firm). But for the last 30 years, she’s also been an avid competitive baker. In fact, she’s won over 600 ribbons in baking competitions, locally, regionally, and nationally. She snagged first place in Seattle’s Best Coffee’s “Red Cup Showdown” for a pumpkin-pie spice and caramelized bacon coffee drink; she’s also appeared on “Good Morning America,” the Discovery Family Channel’s “Bake It Like a Buddy,” and Food Network’s “Bakers vs. Fakers.”

She recently quit her day job and went all-out food-pro with these sauces. I, for one, am glad she did.

Head to the Sunday Night Foods website for more info.

P.S.: Just so you know, I have not been compensated in any way for this post. Eileen lives down the street from me, but I only recently met her while writing a story about her sauces. I’m telling you about them here simply because I think they’re splendid. #NotSponsored!