Torres' book encourages you to cook with chocolate year-round, and gives recipes appropriate for each month. Many of them would work at any time - we found the angel food cake, which was both deeply satisfying and low in calories, in the Mother's Day section. (If you'd like to fancy it up, Torres tells you how to slice it in layers and cover it with whipped cream and berries.) It does use 13 egg whites, so make it at a time when you'll also need scrambled eggs, hollandaise sauce or another dish that will make use of the yolks.
Once you've taken the "wrapper" off Lagorce's book, you'll find a decent guide to the increasingly complicated world of chocolate that's informative without being ponderous. In fact, if you'd like to bypass cooking and just taste different types of chocolate for Valentine's Day, this book will tell you how. And it will also help you pair chocolate with wine.
If you do want to cook, there are 40 mostly approachable recipes here, labeled "subtle," "medium" or "intense" to help you gauge the level of chocolate flavor. We tested a very easy recipe for truffles, which was tasty even though we didn't find the suggested Costa Rican chocolate.
Heavenly Chocolate Desserts looks past the provenance of the chocolate to what any good bar can do for a tart, a cheesecake, a roulade ... the list goes on.
Though the book offers many eye-catching, mouthwatering creations, the one that won our hearts was that "lava" brownie, with the slightly resistant, chocolaty texture of a brownie on top and the sexy ooze of a molten chocolate cake below. It's advertised as "the ideal recipe for absolute beginners."
The other Valentine's plus is that this dessert simply must be eaten warm. Scoop it right out of the pan - no need to bother with the usual brownie squares - and serve with a dollop of ice cream. Eat it all. By morning, the magic will be gone; leftovers, if there are any, will have morphed back into a yummy but decidedly regular brownie.
Yes, romance can be fleeting.
chocolate angel food cake
(serves 18)
3/4 cup sifted cake flour
1/2 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder (see note)
1 1/2 cups sifted superfine sugar (divided use)
13 large egg whites, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
powdered sugar for garnish
