Just Desserts

Looks like baked good guru Maida Heatter (pictured above) will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival for her decades of toiling in the name of Palm Beach Brownies and Queen Mother Cake. And the Miami Herald can't help but shine a sunny spotlight on its local dessert queen:

If South Florida cookbook superstar Maida Heatter were a dessert, she would be complex and elegant, a layered blend of flavors and textures, a hint of mint, perhaps, a trace of hazelnut, a bit of cream. She would be crunchy on the outside with a deep, soft center, dark and rich, its silky, chocolate caress against the tongue flickering memories and sensations, sweetening the flow of time...

...It hardly seems hyperbolic to suggest that ever since Maida Heatter's Book of Great Desserts was published in 1974, no one has tempted or satisfied our national sweet tooth better than this small, white-haired woman whose cookbooks have sold in the millions of copies and whose name is a metaphor for ''Yum.''

Throughout the profile Maida and others wax poetic on her remarkable way with chocolate:

I remember, and this was long ago, when I first said to myself, `This is a sexy taste,' '' Heatter says with a terrific, sly chuckle. 'And I remember thinking that I had never had that feeling about food before, where I connected a certain taste with the word `sex.' I was too young to know what I was saying, but that was my thought.

"To me chocolate means a lot of emotion. Not necessarily some particular emotion, but a lot of emotion that you might not sense from other things. Maybe some people would say that caviar is sexy, but I don't think it can compare with chocolate. . . . I don't think it's got that . . . , oh, whatever it is that you feel all through your body."

I like to think of her as the Dr. Ruth of the dessert world - sans the German accent and advice on battery operated devices. (No Duracells here. You actually need to plug in a standing mixer.)