A Salute To Maida Heatter

We recently lost one of the country's greatest bakers, Maida Heatter. An older generations of home bakers will be more than familiar with her work. She created the most heavenly desserts in an era where calories never counted. Now modern home bakers can enjoy recreating one of her most popular recipes.

Margaux Laskey a regular contributor and food blogger tackled Ms. Heatter's most famous recipe in today's New York Times Food section. It is chocolate mousse torte  that was one of the New York Times most requested and most famous recipes back in 1972. Ms. Heatter never started out to be a baker  yet she did start out in a creative industry - fashion design. This graduate of Pratt Institute could have easily gone into the family business of radio journalism. Her father was the famed journalist Gabriel Heatter. Ms. Heatter discovered baking when her third husband, Ralph Daniels opened up a Miami Beach restaurant in 1966. she volunteered her services which turned out to be a wild success. It was not her baking but her cooking that  caught the eye of Craig Claiborne, the  famed food critic and food journalist at the Times. She offered  an elephant omelet (!) made with real elephant meat (!)  as a promotional stunt for the '72 Republican convention. His article started out with that, but ended up promoting her bittersweet chocolate mousse and Queen Mother cake. From there it was onto cookbook writing where she finally was inducted into the James Beard foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame.

This recipe in today's Food section can be made by anyone. It is a classic chocolate mousse torte with the bottom being fine dry bread crumbs or cocoa powder. It requires eight large eggs, with the yolks and white separated (unfortunately you can't use aqua faba for this). A chopped up semisweet chocolate bar - and not chips make up the backbone of the recipe. There's also a tablespoon of instant espresso or coffee powder is also added for a mocha vibe. The chocolate is first melted in a bain-marie or double boiler. An easier way would be melting the chocolate in the microwave (watch out that it doesn't burn which can easily happen when nuking it). Dissolve the coffee into hot water and then pour it over the chocolate.it's then left to stand for five minutes, covered with a towel.If there are still bits of unmelted chocolate, return to the microwave for fifteen second blasts until everything is melted.  The yolk are then whipped in an electric mixer with the whisk attachment. The chocolate is added along with the vanilla Then the egg whites are whisked with the chocolate mixture being added in small batches.It's then poured into the pie plate and baked for twenty-five minutes.Pop into the fridge to chill  The mousse is topped with a lush homemade whipped cream and dusted with shaved dark chocolate.

Maida Heatter was a national treasure. The same can be said of this decadent dessert. Make it. Enjoy it. It is a rich classic.