Le Chocolat Cookbook by Martine Jolly

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Description: From Martine Jolly, a passionate devotee of chocolate and a very accomplished cook, here in 136 recipes is an imaginative introduction to the desserts and candies for which the French are justly famous. 

Starting with the recipes requiring the least amount of preparation -- mousses, custards, frozen desserts -- Jolly proceeds to more complicated cakes, tarts, and puff pastries, all of which build on basic recipes and techniques. The cook who has enjoyed her classic chocolate mousse, for example, will find a number of delicious uses for it: in an elegant rolled cake, in Pierre Vandenameele's cake (a delectable checkerboard of chocolate mousse with coffee-flavored whipped cream), in puff pastries with chocolate mousse and oranges, even as an all-purpose icing. 

Jolly also explains exactly how to make the most important varieties of pastry dough, from short pastry dough to cream puff pastry. Once these techniques have been mastered, it's possible to make virtually an endless assortment of pastries, from a chocolate tart with pears to hazelnut profiteroles with hot fudge, simply by varying the fillings and sauces. 

From pastries Jolly moves to all manner of other desserts: fondues (using summer and winter fruits), crepes with chocolate fillings, omelets (rum omelet with rum-coffee fudge sauce, chocolate omelet with vanilla ice cream), puddings (chocolate-nut pudding, cinammon-chocolate pudding), a classic chocolate souffle, and cookies and other small desserts (shiny chocolate madeleines, mini-chocolate eclairs, ginger florentines). In addition, she includes excellent recipes for chocolate truffles, caramels, fudge, and other sweets -- all of them delicious, all of them extraordinarily easy to make. 

Le Chocolat is nothing if not complete, and the book also offers readers recipes for drinks and main dishes using chocolate (including a stunning duck with orange-chocolate sauce from three-star chef Alain Senderens), a short history of chocolate, a description of how it is manufactured today, and advice on buying it for cooking. 

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Condition: Good condition.