Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate (Penguin handbooks)

Rating:
Summary: Good Chocolate
Review: This rather modest cookbook from 1983 with no pictures is one of the better chocolate books on my bookshelf. If you can find a copy, it is a good thing to have if you are a casual home baker who makes the occasional chocolate treat at home in your kitchen.

A rarity among baking and chocolate cookbooks, all of the recipes seem to have been thoroughly tested by the author. This assures a reasonable chance of success for even the casual home cook. I had no trouble with the unconventional recipes I picked out for testing. Some of the recipes are clearly the author's own, for example, several separated egg foam cakes that still call for baking powder; clearly a recipe you will not find in the CIA baking book.

On the other hand, there are significant problems. The book copyright is 1983, so many recipes you would expect to find are absent, and there many recipes that are so awful by today's standards that you would never try them (viz. a fake fudge recipe that uses unbaked, raw oatmeal flakes). The brief introductory material on types of chocolates and how to handle them is useless. The author also commits the ultimate baking cookbook sin: specifying flour in cups, not specifying the equivalent weight, and not telling you how she measures her flour (I used scoop and sweep, and it seemed to work correctly except in a couple of recipes). I also noted that some of the more difficult recipes were deficient in detail, but such instances are far fewer than in most contemporary baking books.

In summary, a good chocolate book that deserves a place on your chocolate bookshelf, with the caveats mentioned above.