Maida Heatter - Maida Heatters book of great chocolate desserts

Other books by Maida Heatter

Maida Heatters Book of Great Desserts
Maida Heatters Book of Great Cookies
Maida Heatters Book of Great Chocolate Desserts
Maida Heatters New Book of Great Desserts
Maida Heatters Book of Great American Desserts
Maida Heatters Greatest Dessert Book Ever
Maida Heatters Brand-New Book of Great Cookies

Maida Heatters Book of Great Chocolate Desserts copyright 2006 by Maida Heatter. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

E-ISBN: 978-0-7407-9935-8

Library of Congress Control Number:

Jacket design by Tim Lynch
Cover photos by Kathy Ketner

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To Craig Claiborne with my sincerest respect and admiration

I would like to thank Nancy Nicholas, who
edited all my books. She is a special person who
made it all a pleasure.

After my dessert book and cookie book were published, people who love chocolate soon realized that I was a member of the club. Actually, I am the Chairperson of the Board of the Chocolate Lovers Association of the World. (I started as a Brownie and worked my way up.) Chocolate-lovers could not wait to corner me or my husband (also a member in good standing) and confess to their chocolate addictions, chocolate splurges, chocolate dreams, fantasies, and uncontrollable cravings and hunger for the stuff.

I understand it all. I have had all the same feelings. And I do, I doI do love it!

I come from a long line of chocolate-lovers. And I have spent a good part of my life cooking with chocolate. We understand each other, chocolate and I. My husband says that I can hear chocolate.

People always ask what my favorite dessert is. My answer is anything chocolate. But it is like the line of a song from Finians Rainbow, a Broadway play many years ago, When Im not near the girl I love, I love the girl Im near. So my favorite dessert is whatever is chocolate and is near: mousse, Brownies, pots de crme, Bavarian. Today I made French Chocolate Ice Cream, so today that is my favorite dessert. I would like to be near it forever.

Chocolate is a magnet to many of us. Word of a special chocolate cake at a certain restaurant draws people for hundreds of miles. People send from around the world when they hear of a chocolate dessert they can buy by mail. They rush to put dollars in envelopes to send for a chocolate mousse recipe they know nothing about. When a Swiss chocolatier opened a tiny little hole in the wall of a shop in New York City, I immediately heard about it from friends in California, Chicago, Maine, and neighbors in Miami Beach. It appears to me that when a magazine wants to increase its circulation, they simply have to use a cover photograph of a mouth-watering, three-layer chocolate cake.

Some people (especially me) will stop at nothing to track down the recipe for a dessert they have tasted or heard about. Many, many years ago I bought a certain chocolate cake from a New York patisserie and fell madly in love with it. I simply had to have the recipe, but I could not get it. I tried to duplicate it at least thirty or forty times with no luck. Since I thought that the particular brand of chocolate used in the cake might have been a clue to its unusual flavor, I hung around on the street in front of the shop for many days hoping to see a chocolate delivery truck. I had the cake sent to all the good cooks and pastry chefs I knew around the country to see if they could help me analyze it. I wrote to all the publications that seem to be able to get recipes when no one else can. I even asked my husband to flirt with the lady who baked the cake to try to get the recipe.

I told him, Do anything necessaryjust dont come home without it. When the lady realized his motive she immediately threw him out of her shop. P.S.I still do not have the recipe but havent given up; I keep trying.

The one question I am asked most often is What do you do with all the desserts you make while writing a cookbook? Frankly, we eat an awful lot of them. And we have friends and neighbors, and delivery men, garbage men, gardeners, mailmen, and the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker who hope I will never finish writing this chocolate book.

But recently when a new recipe for Brownies resulted in a dry, tasteless thing, I did not want to pass them on to anyone. We live on Biscayne Bay, where the sky is usually alive with seagulls. For many years we have fed them stale bread and crackers. I didnt know what else to do with the Brownie boo-boo. I decided to try it on the gulls. I have never seen them so excitedthey were frantic; they have never come as close, nor grabbed the food as hungrily; they fought with each other over every crumb. Then they sat out in the bay for hours waiting for more.

Now I not only have a new and appreciative audience, but a hitherto unknown fact about chocolate: Seagulls love it!

In a way, chocolate is like wineor coffee. It is difficult to say which is the best. A connoisseur will be familiar with them all and will know the subtle differences. Everyone does not agree; it is a matter of taste. Just because they look like chocolate dont expect them all to be alike, any more than wines or coffees are alike.

When this book was originally published in 1980, there were only a few different brands of chocolate available. Nowwowthere are so many I cant name them all. If a recipe calls for a certain type, for instance unsweetened or semisweet, etc., please feel free to use any brand you like or any brand available. Taste as many as you can. Cook with as many as you can. See which you like best. Sometimes I prefer certain chocolates for certain recipes because I have made them before and I know the flavor I want. And at times I use different chocolates just to experiment, or simply because that is all that is available at the moment.

Since the price of all chocolate has soared sky-high, it is a truly extravagant luxury. In my years of experimenting with it I have thrown out potfuls and panfuls and bowlfuls. But I dont want you to have any failures. I am always dumbfounded when someone tells me about a recipe that did not turn out right, and then they casually add but that might be because I used fewer eggs and baked it in a larger pan at a lower temperature and I used salad oil instead of butter. Please follow the directions carefully.

When I wrote my other books I left out many chocolate recipes that I loved because I thought that not everyone felt the way I did about it. But now, no holds barred; this is ita chocolate binge.