OP: Cocolat
Shipping calculated at checkout
Warner Books, New York, 1990. Hardcover. Very Good.
Alice Medrich, once a student of Gaston Lenôtre, has long been ahead of the curve on baking and pastry trends, establishing herself as an authority in the field. The New York Times went so far as to say that “Chocolate truffles were virtually unknown in the United States when, in 1973, Alice Medrich started making and selling them from her home in Berkeley.” And her book Gluten-Free Flavor Flours, published in 2014, remains one of the best in the category.
Medrich opened boutique chocolate shop Cocolat in 1976, and by 1990 she had seven outlets and national wholesale distribution. What could be left to do but to write a cookbook of Cocolat’s revelatory recipes?
You’ll find impressive and challenging cakes like the “triangle”—an ordinary, six-layer sponge soaked with orange liqueur and coated with chocolate buttercream converted into a twelve-vertical-layer pyramidal stunner—as well as tarts, truffles, and non-chocolate treats like a brandied apricot-Armagnac loaf or a Christmas bombe lined with a cranberry jelly roll.
The highlight of Cocolat, however, is the substantial “building blocks and finishing techniques” section at the rear, which gives ambitious bakers the tools to go off on their own creative tangents.
Very Good, overall, with minimal shelfwear.
