Filed under: Books, Cookbook of the Day

Chocolate and Vanilla is the newest cookbook from Gale Gand, who is the pastry chef/owner at Tru in Chicago and the first celebrity pastry chef from the Food Network show Sweet Dreams. The book is relatively short compared to some of the encyclopedic volumes that publishers have been putting out lately and has only 144 pages and 60 recipes. This not only makes the book a little bit more manageable for the reader who doesn't want to haul around a 20-pound cookbook, but really allowed Gand to narrow the focus to the two most important flavors in pastry: chocolate and vanilla. The book is divided into two sides, the "yin and yang of the dessert world." In the vanilla section, Gand goes into recipes that use vanilla extracts as well as vanilla beans, bringing out the flavor that underlies just about all others. In the chocolate section, the recipes are divided up according to the type of chocolate they use, making it easy to select a recipe that uses a favorite and easy to try a wide range of chocolate flavors in recipes. You can take a look at a sample recipe for Chocolate-Praline Cake in a Jar before you check out the whole book.