Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Resource
Review: I've really enjoyed everything that I've made from this book. Last July, my daughter made the Marbelized Chocolate Cheesecake to serve to her guests at her tenth birthday party, which I've made quite a few times.I've also made the mint chocolate mousse on a number of occasions. On one, I brought some mousse to a friend's house. She said, after having a bite, "Come on, where's the rest of it? Go get it and bring it over here!". Unfortunately, we had brought her the full recipe.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Resource
Review: I've really enjoyed everything that I've made from this book. Last July, my daughter made the Marbelized Chocolate Cheesecake to serve to her guests at her tenth birthday party, which I've made quite a few times. I've also made the mint chocolate mousse on a number of occasions. On one, I brought some mousse to a friend's house. She said, after having a bite, "Come on, where's the rest of it? Go get it and bring it over here!". Unfortunately, we had brought her the full recipe.
Rating:
Summary: The best chocolate desserts I've ever made
Review: Maida Heatter has written an excellent book on chocolate desserts. I made the chocolate buttermilk cake for coworkers, and two people told me it was the best chocolate cake they had ever tasted. That's worth the cost of the book alone! I can't wait to try more of her chocolate dessert recipes.
Rating:
Summary: Superb, standard book on chocolate desserts
Review: The greatest virtue of Heatter's cookbooks is that the recipes work flawlessly if the directions are followed. This is a great beginner's book. Although the long descriptions may intimidate beginners, the detail informs and encourages.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good But Not Great Chocolate Book
Review: This book has a legendary reputation. It was one of the earliest (1978) bestselling cookbooks about just chocolate. Most cookbook authors and culinary professionals either have it or know about it. I find this chocolate book rather over-rated, but it is nevertheless a good resource for chocolate recipes to have on your bookshelf.
The recipes are an impressive collection from far and wide, and this is reflected in the vastly different recipe instructions. The author seems to have left the procedures largely intact from the original source, other than to supply the details you might have trouble with. I suspect that some of the recipes did not work originally, and the author then had to "fix" them. In the end, I had no trouble with any of the recipes I tried, even the wacky ones I thought would not work (such as a cake that uses whipped cream instead of whipped egg whites). The author has a good feel for what the average home cook is capable of, and most people should not have much trouble with any of the recipes.
The tremendous variety of recipes is this book's strongest suit. It is a scrap book full of truly good recipes from many people and places, many of them professionals and/or famous cooks. It has sections on cakes, cookies, pastry, desserts, and other (confections, sauces, decorations, drinks, reprints).
The author commits the ultimate baking cookbook sin: not specifying how the flour is measured, nor supplying the equivalent weights. The author merely says "fill" a measuring cup with flour and level, but it is not clear if this is "scoop and sweep" or "spoon as sweep". I used spoon and sweep (a la Julia Child), and this seemed to give the correct results. The ingredient lists specify sifted flour, and instructions also specify sifting; it is not clear if the author wants the flour sifted twice (once for measurement and another for mixing the flour with other dry ingredients) or just the once listed in the recipe. If the sifting is during measurement, it is also not clear if this suppose to occur before or after measuring.
Besides flour measurement, it is also lax in other aspects. Varying egg sizes are treated as more or less interchangeable (they are not). Reliable and detailed instructions on how to tell when things are done baking are notably absent. There are no detailed instructions on how to do the 2 things used in virtually every recipe: creaming butter and sugar, or beating egg yolk and sugar to a ribbon stage. The temperature of eggs or butter is usually not specified. A majority of the recipes specify decoration or frosting, but the instructions for them are not supplied. There is a chatty essay about the varieties of chocolate, but the author does not give firm recommendations as to specific brands; she merely lists the commercial brands available at the time, although some recipes do list brands. There is no advice on the proper method of cutting flourless cakes that are notably sticky or moist. In the introductory chapter, there are detailed procedures for folding batters and melting chocolate, subjects that are usually absent from baking books. However, there is not a similar dissertation for whipping egg whites; the brief instructions contained within the recipes are not sufficient. On the bright side, this book has instructions for making pie dough that are complete, detailed, and reliable, quite a rarity these days.
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