For Valentines Day, what better way can you show your love and care than with a delicious homemade dinner. Tyler's gooey, decadent chocolate cake would make a delicious, rich dessert. Or maybe a flourless chocolate cake or a classic French creme brulee would suit your tastes better. No matter what, here are some interesting ideas for Valentine's

Tradition. That’s what you’ll find when you visit Jean Danet in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Started as a French pastry shop forty years ago. Jean Danet offers a wide assortment of gourmet cakes and pastries with no preservatives. Using traditional recipes, our cakes have been drawing people back to Jean Danet for generations. Site design by NANONOTS

Opened in late 2007, David Myers' French brasserie, Comme Ça, French for "like that," is a must. Everything from the Onion Tarte to the Boule Cake, Oysters, Sweet Breads and the location, just by Marc Jacobs, is perfection.

Who said all candles have to smell like french vanilla? Hotwicks claims to have invented a candle that smells like a public restroom... sans the pee. They also have candles that smell like strippers, footballs, and hippies.

Even better, there are some complete menus here for vegetarian meals with recipes for everything from Daniel Boulud's Mediterranean Tomato-Lemon Tart to K.D. Lang's Indonesian Salad with Spicy Peanut Dressing to Donna Hay's Orange and Poppyseed Cake and Hot Chocolate Puddings from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries.

The madeleine or petite madeleine is a traditional cake from Commercy, a commune of the Meuse département in northeastern France.Madeleines are very small cakes with a distinctive shell-like shape acquired from being baked in pans with shell-shaped depressions. Their flavour is similar to, but somewhat lighter than, pound cake, with a pronounced butter-and-lemon taste.Some sources, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, say madeleines may have been named for a 19th century pastry cook, Madeleine Paulmier, but other sources have it that Madeleine Paulmier was a cook in the 18th century for Stanisław Leszczyński, whose son-in-law, Louis XV of France, named them for her. The Larousse Gastronomique offers two conflicting versions of the Madeleine's history.Aside from the traditional moulded pan, commonly found in stores specialising in kitchen equipment and even hardware stores, few tools are required to make madeleines. Traditional recipes include very finely ground nuts (usually almonds) as well as common cake ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla.Madeleines were chosen to represent France in the Café Europe initiative of the Austrian presidency of the European Union, on Europe Day 2006. The Proust connectionMadeleines are perhaps most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time), in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine with limeflower tea:“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”    — Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way.