The Chocolate Lover’s Cookbook

The Chocolate Lover’s Cookbook boasts over fifty sweet, chewy, and ooey-gooey chocolate recipes. With recipes for everything from brownies and cookies to cheesecake and pudding, there are plenty of options for the chocolate lover in all of us. The recipes range in difficulty from a three ingredient cream pop to a more involved triple layer, multi-stage peanut butter and chocolate tart.

I’m the kind of cookbook amateur who looks to cookbooks to nurture my work-in-progress kitchen finesse—the kind who picks up a cookbook because of the great pictures, flips through it for the variety of recipes, and takes it home because it makes me hungry. I appreciate a relative lack of backstory dump and love directions that are clear and concise. Although on the whole the recipes themselves turned out decently, The Chocolate Lover’s Cookbook failed on too many accounts for me to feel the need to return to it too often. Despite the enticing cover, the photographs throughout were horribly pixilated and the recipes could have benefited from another round of editing as the first portion of a recipe was likely to instruct you to begin preparing an ingredient that was never mentioned again—as with the Brownie Bottom Cheesecake, which, in the end, left you with an unused bowl of melted chocolate chips.