Reine de Saba

Valentine's Day, 2010:  We were craving chocolate cake a few days before Valentine's Day.  It had nothing to do with the both of us being single, a long string of movie nights, or afternoons spent drinking coffee and doing homework.  It had nothing to do with romance at all.  Or solitude.  Sure, we mooned over the occasional musician, laughed about ex-boyfriends, or played Billie Holiday over the speakers of an ipod when the mood struck, but the chocolate craving was totally apart from all of this.  So when Valentine's Day finally arrived we didn't have much to do.  We decided to make a cake.  A chocolate cake.  A Reine de Saba almond and chocolate cake from Julia Child's cookbook.  It involved lots of separate and complicated steps:  melt the chocolate with coffee in a small pan placed in a larger pan with a spoonful of coffee, whip the egg whites until they frothed into a fluffy white meringue, heat the butter, add the sugar, pulverize the almonds, and fold in the ingredients in decreasing amounts until they come together in a thick, chocolaty, batter.  Then wait. The cake was amazing.  Thick and rich and complex. And that was Valentine's day.  A chocolate cake.