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The Art of Chocolate

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The Art of Chocolate (Canada, UK)
By Elaine Gonzalez
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Publication Date: Oct. 1998
ISBN: 081181811x

There are two sins that can spoil a perfectly good chocolate book — gushing (“ooooh, I dream about chocolate day and night!!!”) and fussiness (“you must get the chocolate to precisely 92.863° Fahrenheit before stirring it in a counterclockwise direction three times!”)

Fortunately, The Art of Chocolate is plagued by neither. In a level-headed way, the book covers a pretty broad spectrum of what you can do with chocolate. It offers a huge amount of information and page after page of tips, interspersed with four or five dozen recipes that range from basic to daunting.

The recipes start small to inspire confidence (chocolate medallions — or what most of us know as pecan turtles, chocolate dipped fruit and cookies, and chocolate-covered toffee), through truffles (piped and rolled) and molded chocolates, and build to highly decorated chocolate bows, boxes, flowers, and centerpieces.

There are recipes for a variety of cakes, including cheesecake, sponge cake, chocolate almond torte, daquoise, and a basic layer cake; and for mousses, icings, frostings, and other fillings, sauces, syrups, and glazes. The cakes and various fillings are combined to create quite a number of innovative desserts, such as the Chocolate Swiss-Cheese Cake (a chocolate cheesecake topped by a piece of white chocolate with holes that simulates Swiss cheese), Gâteau Domino (a chocolate date-nut cake enrobed in chocolate, mounted on a slab of white chocolate, decorated with a white chocolate bow, and sprinkled with dark chocolate dots), and an Andalusian Torte (a chocolate-almond torte, covered in dark chocolate and decorated with white chocolate gardenia flowers and leaves).

Clearly the instructions for molded chocolate require specialized equipment (the molds) that you may not have on hand, but author Elaine González has avoided requiring you to load up on a lot of new toys just to make most of these treats. Her explanation of tempering chocolate, by the way, is certainly among the best I have seen in any book on chocolate.

The book itself is elegant, well laid out, and of a particularly high quality, but I would appreciate more photos — desserts this fancy should each be illustrated, and perhaps only half the recipes have accompanying photos.

To be honest, there are things in this book that the average home cook is never going to attempt. But there are enough other basic recipes and ideas that make this book perfectly suitable for a beginning chocolatier as well as more advanced confection makers. As with any cookbook, the more experience you have, the more you will be able to do with the authors’ ideas and recipes, but this is an excellent teaching book that will give you a solid foundation in the art of working with chocolate.

The Art of Chocolate (Canada, UK)

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