Great Chocolate Desserts
The Best Chocolate Cookbooks, from Easy to Elegant to Extravagant, Perfect for Valentine's Day
If you ever wanted to eat chocolate cake, mousse, crème brulee, torte, ganache, or truffles until it killed you or enable someone else to, try these fantastic cookbooks.
I like to cook, and my favorite supper course is dessert. I like light lemon mousse, and I adore velvety vanilla crèmes, but chocolate is my one, true love. With thousands of psychoactive compounds, chocolate makes me giddy with delight. It also helps prevent Alzheimer’s Disease, so one can eat it for “medicinal purposes.” And Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Start making your chocolate preparations now!
However, my one true love can be a witch to work with. Chocolate in its elemental state is cantankerous and finicky. Heat it too fast, and it burns. One drop of water can make melted chocolate seize, an irreversible chemical reaction. To work with chocolate successfully, you need a great cookbook.
My recommended author is Alice Medrich. Anything this woman writes is fantastic. I own two of her cookbooks: Cocolat, named after her Berkeley bakery, and Bittersweet, which is part-memoir but mostly chocolate recipes. Both these books are phenomenal.
Cocolat by Alice Medrich was one of her first cookbooks. It’s not for the weak of heart or the high of cholesterol. This book teaches you to turn out showstoppers.
If you’re throwing an old-fashioned dinner party and want to impress your boss, make the Tricolor Mousse (page 54.) Though it takes some planning, it is far simpler than it looks. It looks great. Three layers of scrumptious mousse, very dark, milk, and white, layered in glasses or a springform pan, can be made a day ahead. (Good luck keeping your fingers out of them, though.)
The Queen of Sheba cake (page 47,) which Medrich describes as “a French housewife’s classic,” again looks phenomenal, but is easier to make than it looks. The homemade cake only has a few ingredients. The marbled chocolate on top is easy with the clear diagrams and steps, and it looks like it came from a $500 per cake bakery.
The toasted meringue-covered Yule log looks like it was found out in the forest, but it’s delicious.
Her truffles are the most exquisite truffles that I’ve ever eaten. After eating fresh cream, crisp-shelled, inside-melting Cocolat truffles, you’ll never eat store-bought ones again, even Godiva, without knowing that you can make them better.
Medrich’s genius is that she breaks down her recipes into sub-recipes (like chocolate sheet cake, white chocolate mousse filling, and ganache frosting,) which makes them accessible to a less-than-Cordon-Bleu-trained cook. A list of 45 ingredients and two days’ prep would send me screaming out the door, but I can follow a list of 6 ingredients and few steps, then set that aside and make the filling (4 ingredients, two steps,) then set that aside and make the ganache frosting, then assemble.
The techniques and basic recipes at the end of Cocolat are worth the price of the whole book. After reading through this book, I not only feel equal to any recipe in the book, but I feel inspired to create my own desserts from the basic recipes and techniques.
Medrich’s most recent book, Bittersweet, has some lovely essays and reminiscences in among her fabulous recipes.
This update to Cocolat has techniques for making dishes that used to include raw eggs, like the incredible chocolate marquise, but now Medrich’s “safe-egg” technique makes those mousses safe from salmonella poisoning by judicious use of heat. The resulting mousses are fabulous, heart-stopping fabulous, and you don’t have to spend three days wondering if the salmonella bug got you.
Bittersweet also includes quite a few new recipes, including some very nice savory Mexican moles. Most of these recipes are lower in fat and / or calories than the ones found in Cocolat, but it’s chocolate. It’s not diet food.
To get your chocolate fix right now, try these chocolate recipes on the web.
For what to serve before the chocolate course, try these South Indian Vegetarian Cookbooks.
