Valentine's Day: Do chocolate high heels say, 'I love you'? (+video)

"Every now and then, I have a guy come in and say, 'I'm in trouble, what do I do?'" she said, adding that they have several options that can help smooth ruffled feathers, including a $100 Godiva heart adorned with a massive fabric flower.

Over at Baum's Fine Pastries, there's also brisk business at both stores around Valentine's Day.

"When I tell you we have everything in a heart shape that you can imagine, we do," Sue Odom, general manager, said, including candies, truffles, fudge boxes, dipped berries and pastries, including a heart-shaped king cake made from brownies and filled with cream cheese.

"It's amazing," Odom said. "It is so good."

Odom also pointed out that both locations of the bakery are open, despite a fire at the Florida Boulevard store just before Thanksgiving.

"We never, ever missed one day," she said, but many people think the damage was much worse than it was.

This year, Baum's is debuting two new Valentine's treats, a red velvet layer cake-New York cheesecake combination iced with sweetened cream cheese and a red velvet heart filled with strawberry mousse and covered in poured ganache and topped with a red velvet chocolate heart.

"It's really just for one person; it's small," she said. "But you talk about amazing."

Down in New Orleans, Ann Streiffer, owner of Blue Frog Chocolates, is also awash in hearts — heart-shaped boxes, Victorian-molded chocolate hearts, heart pops and gummy hearts — along with some other, more unusual Valentine's confections.

"We have a pair of giant lips," she said, that weigh in at about half a pound of chocolate. "They're just gorgeous."

The store also features Italian candy flowers with centers of sugar paste. They come in chocolate, licorice and chocolate almond flavors. Streiffer said the shop will arrange them in bouquets or sell them by the single stem.

Blue Frog also pitches the health benefits of dark chocolate and offers a heart with a high cocoa content.

"It's a bigger heart than we normally have," Streiffer said. "We call it our heart-healthy dark chocolate heart.

"It's very simple and elegant."

Sucré in New Orleans offers chocolate alongside its famous macarons. Zack Pontious, the shop's customer service and social media coordinator, said the chocolates come in three types: red raspberry, Paris tea and malted milk.

The Paris tea uses Hardy & Sons Paris tea, a fruity black tea with vanilla and caramel flavors and a hint of lemon, to flavor the chocolate. The shop also has homemade marshmallows and a rose petal and pistachio chocolate bar. But, far and wide, the macarons are what Sucré is most known for, even on chocolate-heavy Valentine's Day.

"The macarons themselves are a red and white shell and they've got a white chocolate raspberry mousseline filing," he said, and can be ordered with champagne or wine, or with the chocolates.

"You can order them together," Pontious said. "That makes a really nice gift together, I think, if you have the Valentine's macarons and the chocolates together."

___

Information from: The Advocate, http://theadvocate.com

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Previous

1 | 2