Chocolate & Vanilla

I found this book as good as all Gale's books are love it.

With this cookbook, deciding on desert is easy. First you make the basic decision, Chocolate or Vanilla. Then you turn the book to the front cover that reflects that decision. Start with the front cover that's basically brown colored, i.e. chocolate colored and you start with some words on the basic nature of chocolate followed by page after page of recipies featuring chocolate. Turn the book over, and the cover gets a white background, i.e. vanilla colored. Then you get some words on vanilla, followed by recipies featuring vanilla. Kind of a gimmick, but why not. who says that an adult cookbook can't have some fun. And in fact, you now know that the section on chocolate and the section on vanilla are both at the front of the book. As I said, your make your first and fundamental question about desert: chocolate or vanilla.

`chocolate and vanilla' by Chicago star pastry chef and Food Network maven, Gale Gand, with co-author credits for Lisa Weiss is a gimmick book on at least two levels. Ms. Gand is the co-owner of Tru (along with former husband, executive chef Rick Tramonto), one of the most highly honored restaurants in Chicago. But unlike her business partner Rick's cookbooks, which aspire to the heights of sophistication reached by Thomas Keller and fellow Chicagoan, Charlie Trotter, Ms. Gand's books all tend to be very light, with recipes almost always oriented to simply having fun in the kitchen. This also sets her books apart from the excellent cookbooks by other leading pastry chefs such as `The Sweet Life' by Chanterelle pastry chef, Kate Zuckerman and `The Secrets of Baking' by Spago pastry chef, Sherry Yard. This is above all, a gimmick book, which is rare in cookbooks for adults. The most obvious manifestation of the book's surprise approach is that it is not really a book about chocolate and vanilla together, but two completely separate books, one about vanilla and the other about chocolate. The two are bound together between the same covers, but the book on the one subject is printed upside down and backwards against the text of the other text. This is initially surprising, since vanilla and chocolate together is one of the most dramatic arguments for the notion of `terroir' in the whole culinary world. As Ms. Gand points out in her independent introductions to the two products, both are native to central America, including what is now southern Mexico, and, the pre-Columbian cultures actually used the two together in their `hot chocolate' preparations, along with another famous New World product, chiles. This admixture of vanilla and chocolate is no geographical accident, as it is still a universal practice today to add vanilla to chocolate products to help bring out its flavor. When these two products made their way to Europe on the conquistador's galleons, the combination fell into disuse, as the combination of chocolate with sugar made a much bigger impression on the early European chocoheads. I must note at this point that Ms. Gand and her book team at Clarkson Potter dropped the ball in editing this book when they referred to Europe and not the Americas as the `New World'. There are a few other geographical oddities of expression, but none except this one will do anything to spoil your enjoyment of this book. Since this book is all about having fun with baking, it may not be seen as a `must buy', especially for those who already own several good books on baking and at least one good book on chocolate. This is especially true as Ms. Gand does not even present the technique of tempering chocolate, and none of her recipes require that the home cook do any tempering themselves. She has a nice but short story of how chocolate was distributed around the world and how it's processing evolved over the last 400 years, but a book dedicated to chocolate w

I just bought this book and made a recipe right away. I tried the Golden Cake with Fudge Frosting. The cake and the frosting were delicious. However, I would suggest that you reduce the amount of almond extract to maybe half of what is called for. The cake had a overwhelming almond taste. Not bad, just overwhelming. The setup of the book was helpful. When you turn to the table of contents, the recipes are organized according to the kind of chocolate called for ie; semi sweet, white ect. The Vanilla side is organized by either beans or extract. There is also a brief history of chocolate and vanilla included. There are picture of some of the recipes in the middle of the book. As far as the level of expertise needed, I would rate this easy. I am happy with my purchase.