A Blithe PALATE

One Pot Sour Cream Chocolate Cake

A few months ago, I got a copy of Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger's book, "The Essence of Chocolate."  It's the sort of cookbook that totally appeals to me:  big, thick, textured paper, gorgeously photographed, with varied recipes -- and oh yes, all about chocolate.  What's not to love?  While pregnant with Puggle, I spent a lot of my leisure time (that is to say, when I wasn't comatose from pregnancy-induced narcolepsy) reading cookbooks and this was one of my favorites.  Many of the recipes are contributed by such luminaries as Jacques Pepin, Thomas Keller and Michael Chiarello but they are the supporting players to the book's clear star:  chocolate, in all its lovely stages and forms.

It's as much a memoir and a history and primer on all things chocolate as it is a cookbook.  Steinberg is a former physician who fell in love with the art of chocolate making when he spent a few weeks in Lyon learning about the trade.  He teamed up with Scharffenberger, his former patient and in 1996, the company that became America's domestic producer of high end chocolate, Scharffen Berger, was born.  I've mentioned before that I have met the Chocolate King. I have to say that there's something delicious about finding the same high end sort of chocolate States-side.  I am a fan:  my morning hot chocolate is made with their cocoa and my pantry is lined with Scharffen Berger chocolate to cook  with and to eat.

While there are several recipes in the book that have piqued my fancy (frozen chocolate mousse!), as a new mother with limited time (self-induced as I'm more inclined to spend my time holding my son than a whisk), this one is the sort of hit and run ("It hit the spot and now I have to run to get that spot off my hips.") dessert I love. 

Dinner was also inspired by a recipe in the book:  a roast chicken rubbed with John Scharffenberger's cocoa and salt recipe (yes, cocoa), which produced a flavorfully complex richness and crisp skin.  Hubby quite enjoyed the chicken -- and I did not bother to tell him it was essentially a chocolate chicken.  And  while we ate our chicken, this lovely cake was in the oven.

All the ingredients are literally combined in one pot:  natural (not Dutch processed) cocoa, butter, water, sugar, flour, baking soda, sour cream and egg, whisked evenly together and then poured into a pan.  Being entirely too lazy to butter and flour an 8 inch pan, I poured the batter into a Teflon-coated 9 inch pan.  Now I wish I'd made extra effort because the dense, moist, intensely chocolate cake would have been better served a little thicker and more elevated, instead of the nearly tart like height it's currently got.  Alternatively, the recipe can also be used to make cupcakes -- which I think is what I'll make next time.  Definitely top with a dollop of fresh whipped cream -- the mellow smoothness of the chantilly provides a nice counterpoint to the intensity of the chocolate.

Tonight was the first time I've pulled the book off the shelf -- primarily because up until a few weeks ago, I wasn't quite sure where the book was; the new cookbook case has proven quite useful.  I noticed that I've earmarked several recipes and I think that based on this wonderful dessert, I'm going to have to try to the others.

Maybe Puggle won't mind my putting him down to pick up a whisk to make something chocolate-y and sweet.

Culinary Bibliomania.

Ivonne and I were talking about how much we love our cookbooks and how we read them as if they are novels.  My friend Julie says she can't think of anything more excruciating than reading a cookbook. I can't think of anything more exquisite.  Cookbooks (a really nice one anyway) incite three of my five senses:  sight (those pictures), touch (the feel of the paper) and taste (my imagination and experience filling in  the blanks on how a recipe might taste).  Can you think of better entertainment?

The cookbooks have got a new home.  It was necessary.  For a long time, they co-mingled happily with their fiction and non-fiction brethren on various bookshelves throughout the house.  There was a lovely symmetry to finding the seafood cookbook marching alongside the Aubrey-Maturin collection, and a French cookbook or two nestled amidst De Beauvoir's Letters to Sartre and Flaubert's Madame Bovary...

When bibliophiles marry, our libraries, do too (and of course, said one of my divorced friends, the converse is true in that the tearing asunder of libraries is almost as painful as the dissolution of the relationship).  Hubby and I live in a home overflowing with the Dewey Decimal System.  We do not live with books, we live among them.  But whilst Hubby is a democratic sort of booklover -- he will lend his books out willy nilly and not expect their return, I belong to a much more selfish and tyrannical school:  my books stay with me and if they leave the house at all, they do so in the possession of those whom I trust to return them.  Theoretically, as fast as Hubby will loan out his books you would think that their numbers might dwindle in our house? But no. What makes up for those disappearing books is the constant inflow of cookbooks.  I accumulate cookbooks -- gifts, review copies, hand me downs (I cannot visit a used bookstore without scoping out the cookbook section in hopes of scoring something unique).  And yes, I purchase too.  Amazon has been so good to me that I am on a first name basis with my UPS delivery man.

When it became clear that our system of finding a cookbook when we needed it was hope and luck, we arrived at the realization that perhaps it was time for the cookbooks to have their own home.  Yes, it was fun finding my book on risottos behind the piano (I have no idea, so don't ask), but not when I was searching for it.  And now, some months after that decision, all the cookbooks have been rounded up and share space together, directly around the corner from the kitchen.

But I think they miss their old mates because The French Laundry cookbook has found its way next to Vineyard Tales and Christine Mansfield Desserts is side by side with In A Sunburned Country...