Lascivious Desires

These are excerpts from a review entitled, Chocolate stokes Bay Area's 'lascivious desires' by John Birdsall, originally published in the Contra Costa County Times, February 9, 2005. Contra Costa Times web site version of this article requires free registration. Reprinted by permission.

ALL THAT BUZZ about oysters, caviar and Spanish fly notwithstanding, it's chocolate that is everyone's favorite aphrodisiac. Since it seeped into Europe from Central America in the 1500s (and from Europe to North America), chocolate has been synonymous with pleasure and vice, a dangerous stimulus, according to one 17th-century Spanish cleric, to "lascivious desires." Here in the Bay Area, we take our lascivious desires very seriously, and here, arguably like nowhere else in the country, chocolate is serious business. And checking in with local pastry chefs, it's clear that Feb. 14 will be a day of serious chocolate-smudged venery.

The East Bay's coolest place for you and your sweetie to get all jacked up on theobromines may be the evocatively beaux arts Crixa Cakes in Berkeley. Owner Elizabeth Kloian's handsome cafe and bakery is a fantasy of Prague, with beamed ceilings, walnut sideboards and copper pastry molds festooned with rope lights. For Valentine's Day, Kloian plans to offer specials that express her playful, richly embroidered style, steeped in a central and eastern European aesthetic.

Consider Fatima's Thighs: voluptuous rolls of flaky pastry containing a fractured skeleton of crunchy slivered almonds and currants, fragrant with rose and orange flower waters. My current favorite of Kloian's creations, however, is one of her regulars: the flourless chocolate Pave Vergiate. It's a kind of airy brownie served in big slabs, a stiffened foam of chocolate, butter, eggs and sugar that collapses like a sigh in your mouth, neither overly rich nor gooey nor dank the way flourless chocolate cakes always are.