Chocolate and Vanilla by Gale Gand

Chocolate and Vanilla

by Gale Gand and Lisa Weiss

This is a book review in a sense.. in the sense that I'll actually be trying each and every one of the recipes in this book and posting my experience and opinions about it. I've had some success with several of Gale Gand's recipes in the past and since I share her love for intensely sweet desserts I've picked her latest book as a beginning training ground. The recipes in this book are not particularly advanced except for a few of them... chocolate macaroons, ladyfingers... I'd say that most of them are pretty easy and straight-forward... vanilla malteds, fudgy brownies, etc. But its the holidays and good time for me to spread the "sweet" and since a lot of the recipes are pretty traditional, I figured it would be good. (I'm still making my gingerbread cookies though and snowman cake though!)

I've actually already tried a few recipes but I have to sadly report that they did not turn out well. The first one that I tried "Hot Chocolate Pudding" was just way too sweet that my boyfriend actually said it had a "burning sensation". It could have been because I used Ghiradelli 60% chocolate and the excess sugar in their chocolate might have been too much already.

The second recipe I tried was Chocolate "burgers" with white chocolate filling. To begin with, calling delicate french macaroon cookies "burgers" is a little bit of trashy usage for this type of cookie. When I think of burgers, I think easy and casual... not difficult and fancy which is what french macaroons really are. Anyhow, the recipe called for 1 egg white... 1 egg white with 3 cups of confectioners' sugar! The recipe then goes on to say that the resulting batter should be "soupy". Well mine was anything far from "soupy" or wet for that matter. It seemed kind of odd that 1 egg white (a mere 2 1/4 tablespoons of liquid) could make 3 cups of sugar "soupy" so I looked into more french macaroon recipes and found that a lot of them used at least 3 to 4 egg whites with a lot less confectioners sugar. I'm not sure if its a typo in the book or I am doing it completely wrong.

I tried out some other macaroon recipes and they turned out okay. I'll post more about this later.