Surprise! You know what? Making your own chocolates is easy. Really.Ingredients: equal amounts of bitter cocoa powder and blanched almonds; Cointreau, powdered sugar, cocoa powder. Add, to taste, candied orange peel and cream.

The verdict? "They're cold...". And there you go-- you kill yourself making your own chocolates, blending to a paste equal weights of cacao and almonds ground nearly to dust particles (thank heavens for the electric grinder-- literally a weight off your shoulders!) and then what does he have to say? The great Valentine...?

The love with which I dribbled the Cointreau, drop by drop to ensure a mass soft enough to form those little balls into perfectly flattened, oblong little shapes! What love? Wasted love, I'm telling you!

You think it was an excess of zeal that drove me to roll each little chocolate first in the powdered sugar, then in the cocoa? All for nothing. What does he know.... I was aiming for a sweet, slightly bitter covering. I wanted to give the guy a real treat. And him? "Cold, he says!"

Yeah, well, they'd better be cold! No palm oil in these little ones, so they're sensitive to the heat and need to be stored in the fridge. And you, Lunkhead, down one after another accompanied by a continuous lament: " chocolate should be eaten at room temperature..."; I know that, lover, but that doesn't hold for the tropical heat you've generated in the apartment to combat the winter cold clamping its teeth outside the door.

And "chomp, gobble, gulp" goes yet another. In less than half an hour you've managed to polish them off. So, look-- either you retract your nasty comments right now and admit that my chocolates, cold or no, were absolutely delicious or else! Or else, tomorrow's dinner consists of scorpion fish bones in lemon juice! My brother suggested that one: "Women shouldn't go spoiling us, we men just aren't able to appreciate the effort".

The next day, you insist on knowing why on Earth I've used such a primitive recipe. Number one, it's easy. Anybody can try it.
Second, because I have no desire to temper the chocolate. I'm not Peirano, y'know, even if I did live in Torino for years and was able to personally sample ALL the over 70 kinds of candies they make around there.

Tempered chocolate is fondant chocolate heated to 45° -all temps in °Celsius- in a double-boiler, cooled to 26°, then warmed to 30-31°, would provide the perfect covering for my chocolates: it remains shiny and doesn't melt. You could just dip the chocolates in it one by one and set them on a rack to harden. Bye-bye fridge. But tempering the chocolate just won't work for me. Me, I get thrown off if I have to use a scale in the kitchen-- just forget a thermometer!

The day before St. Valentine's has arrived so I give it another go, but this time I try something different: I replace a fifth of the almonds with finely minced candied orange peel and part of the alcohol with a few spoons full of cream. I find that if you toast the almonds in the oven before grinding them, they release more oil and give off a rich aroma. At the end, they get the same powdered sugar and cocoa massage.

I had actually planned on packing pretty boxes of chocolates as presents for friends but my experiments, cold though they were, were intercepted and devoured by a certain guy who failed to demonstrate the proper enthusiasm. OK, tonight there's gonna be a little surprise on his plate: a still life creation composed of scorpion fish bones in lemon juice. One should approach Valentine's Day with a light heart -- and an empty stomach in some cases!