Unwrapped: Green and Black's Chocolate Recipes edited by Caroline Jeremy
Since I first saw this book in our local Oxfam shop in Dublin I’ve been having lustful thoughts about it. Green & Black’s produce fabulous organic Fair Trade chocolate – their spice/orange Maya Gold bar heading the list of my all time favourite chocolates – and the photos that I saw on a brief browse through the book were mouth-watering. It’s taken some time but I finally bought my own copy and my first impressions did not deceive.
I was delighted to see that a New Zealand book that I’ve written about here – 
Why is it that recipe names look so much more evocative when written in French? Gâteau au chocolate et à l’abricot seems so much more sophisticated than just plain Chocolate apricot cake. Still, from the look of this slice of this moist dark cake pictured in 
It’s not often that chefs can manage to simplify techniques so that they are both intelligible and useful to those of us who confine our cooking to the home kitchen but Auckland-based Genevieve McGough has managed it in Brilliant But Basic. In this slim publication she deals with a total of 19 different techniques, teaching formulas for useful cooking basics such as meringue, risotto, slow-cooked meats and cheesecake.
Penny Oliver, the New Zealand author of Beach, Bach, Boat, Barbeque, has returned to outdoor pursuits for her latest book At Home, At Play. With fabulous photographs of rivers, cooking over outdoor fires, mountains, camping with frost on tents, kayaking and heavy snowfalls, she intersperses her recipes – divided into chapters called Eat Up, Chill Out, Warm Up and Time Out – with views of New Zealand.