I Bake I Bake mankori@hotmail.com Normally, people ...

Normally, people give chocolate to their sweethearts on Valentine's Day. Why? Because chocolate is a source of pleasure. And why is chocolate a source of pleasure? Because it tastes good.

But times have changed. Diets that forbid sugar and other things that make life worth living are altering the food landscape. Nowadays, food is looked at as though it's the problem rather than the solution. Food is no longer your friend.

Meryl Ankori, a fledgling entrepreneur based in Queens, is gearing up to make extra batches of her unapologetically rich fudge sauce for Valentine's Day orders. Her ingredients: cocoa, heavy cream, sugar, butter and vanilla.

"The only thing that I do understand in chemistry," Ankori tells me with a wag of her finger, "is that fat delivers flavor!"

Meryl Ankori is thin. She is up every morning at 5:30 for power walks. She eats whatever she wants. And she is happily married.

"One of the saddest stories I think I ever heard was about Jackie Kennedy at Le Cirque," says Ankori, a woman in her early 50s with jumpy eyebrows and short curly hair. "Sirio Maccioni would send her all of their desserts, and they would come back untouched. After she got sick, that's when she would eat the desserts. It's so sad."

Prior to starting I Bake, her two-year-old operation whose product line so far includes her hot fudge, a buttery caramel sauce and airy homemade marshmallows, Ankori taught an after-school cooking class at the Solomon Schechter School in Queens for 14 years.

"I don't have to do this," she says, fiddling behind the counter in her Fresh Meadows kitchen. "There's no one here standing around waiting for me to make fudge so that I can make money!"

Rather, the product preceded the business. "I started making the sauce when my kids were little. We were ice cream fanatics, so finding a good ice cream topping made me crazy."

While Ankori has heard from fans who insist that they cannot open a jar of her chocolate sauce without finishing it, she has also collected a few detractors for precisely that reason.

"They call me evil," Ankori balks, recalling comments heard during a tasting demo at Chelsea Market Baskets (one of two New York venues that carry her goods; the other is the General Store on Ave. B). "They'd call me names and say, 'How can you be feeding me this stuff?' and 'Who needs it?' Well, in this world, you need it!"

Ankori is still working out plans to increase production of the I Bake line and to develop a few new products, like cookies and granola, in the coming months. For now, she still teaches.

"You should hear the things I say to these kids when I'm on lunch duty. A kid had a chocolate sandwich and two chocolate cupcakes. I asked, 'This is your lunch?'

"My mother always said, 'Everything in moderation.' Only after she died I realized she got that from Julia Child."

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