Valentine’s Day is one week away so we thought we’d start thinking about it now, rather than our usual last minute scramble. Chocolate is, of course, the classic valentine, so we’ve rounded up our very best chocolate desserts and gifts, all homemade, all easy to make. Here are our recommendations, with annotations:
Essential Chocolate Cake for Improvising…an elegant cake that is as easy to make as a pan of brownies
Chocolate Malted Pudding… intensely chocolate pudding with an undercurrent of malt
Homemade ‘Peanut Butter Cups’…crunchy peanut butter sandwiched between bought chocolate disks
Dark Chocolate Cakelets with Aromatic Pepper and…cupcake as grownup cakelet, subtly spiked with bacon
Homemade Chocolates for Improvising… a foolproof method for making sheets of fine chocolate spiked with unusual flavors and textures, like curry powder and sea salt; Marcona almonds and pimenton de la Vera; dried cherries and lavender…
Alt-Malted Milks Balls well, really, slabs of fine chocolate laced with malted milk
oh… anything for the chocoholics on a diet? 🙂
As a matter of fact……I do. They’re from my book A New Way to Cook: a SWELL Chocolate Mousse Cake p.500 (devised after A LOT of experimenting) and a lovely Chocolate Angel Food Cake p. 502. I found a copy of the Mousse Cake recipe online that had been published in Food & Wine many years ago.
Wow, that is a great chocolate cake picture. I wish I got that cake for valentines day