I bake a lot. Sometimes I'm tinkering with a new recipe for a possible column. Sometimes I'm hauling out an old favorite for a potluck. Sometimes I'm just warming up our uninsulated apartment on a cold day. Any way you slice it, baking is an ordinary feature of my life. And to me, baking without chocolate is about as much fun as an empty candy wrapper.

My husband is profoundly sensitive to chocolate. We don't know if it's a true allergy, since genuine allergies to chocolate are very rare. We do know that he doesn't even have to ingest chocolate to develop a rash and have trouble breathing. So I time my baking accordingly.

Usually this works just fine. He works outside the home and I work in it, and he usually takes our son out one day on weekends as well.

For the past month or so, however, he's been sick at home more often than not. I feel very guilty about the fact that, on top of all our other stress about this, I'm really going nuts without chocolate baked goods.

"Can't you sneak a bar of chocolate in?" a friend of mine asked. "Open all the windows or something?"

Well, yes. If I were forced by my husband's illness to go without chocolate altogether, you wouldn't be reading this right now. I'd be too busy sobbing to type.

But although I love chocolate, I need more than just plain chocolate. I want chocolate something. Chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter and chocolate muffins, and of course brownies.

I could make a trip to the bakery, I suppose. But again, it's not just the chocolateness. It's the idea of something warm-out-of-the-oven chocolaty.

I was going through withdrawals last week as I stopped by the grocery store. In the baking supply aisle, I saw some new items that ordinarily wouldn't have provoked my notice. Under my current circumstances, they were not only interesting, but possibly necessary.

Betty Crocker has come out with a line of microwaveable chocolate desserts called Warm Delights. I grabbed packages of Molten Caramel Cake, Peanut Butter Fudge Brownies, and Fudgy Chocolate Chip Cookies, and spent a week happily taking them for a test drive.

Warm Delights are, as their names indicate, extremely rich and very sweet. They're a good size to share, but not so big that you couldn't finish one yourself. They are only intended to be prepared in the microwave, and come with little recyclable bowls in which they can be both heated and served.

These desserts are extremely quick and convenient. Their heating time is around a minute. Between that and the fact that our microwave is situated right next to a window, my husband's alarm system didn't have time to go off.

One advantage of Warm Delights over old-fashioned homemade cakes or brownies is that these are cool enough to eat almost immediately. The Molten Caramel Cake had to sit and cool for five minutes after being heated; the others only took two. No burned tongues, no fretful "Can we have dessert yet?" from my son (or myself).

Another perk is that Warm Delights are pretty much complete as is. You add a little water and stir, and you're ready to go. You don't need to have oil, eggs, milk, or butter on hand.

Yes, they don't taste as good as homemade. I didn't expect them to. At this point, I was just hoping they wouldn't be terrible. And they're not. They're really quite nice, especially if you're as warm-cake deprived as I was.

My situation is, I realize, fairly unique. However, Warm Delights would be handy for the dessert lover who is temporarily without a working kitchen (you can plug a microwave in almost anywhere, after all), or a family whose resident baker is off the premises. They'd be a cozy addition to a "bachelor" kitchen, and a nice treat for the single non-baker who enjoys a warm goodie now and then. They're fun for kids who are too young to cook unsupervised but old enough to want to make something "by themselves." My son had a great time stirring the powdery mix, and squeezing caramel and chocolate goo out of little foil pouches. And, of course, eating the results.