Reviews and Comments

I found this book a little disappointing because of how it's organized and how much of baking it tries to cover. It starts out with a ton of information about baking as a profession, tools, and technical information about baking (like tables of different gelling agents, and bread techniques and terminology). All of that information is really good, well curated, and clear, but I wished that the techniques specific to certain kinds of baking were placed with the recipes, rather than all together at the beginning. It also spends a lot of time, understandably, on professional bread techniques, and a lot less on pastry techniques. It feels at times like a bread book with some pastry recipes included.

There are tons of recipes, but often they are variants on a theme (like banana, chocolate, or lacenut tuiles) but no basic recipe and no information on how to modify the recipe yourself or what makes the modifications work. The pastry recipes aren't terribly well organized, not much time gets devoted to different types, and there are big omissions (like macarons).

I think it is just too ambitious to have a single book about "baking and pastry"!

This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.

The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the characters.

While the author has put a lot of thought into gender and sexuality, even if I found it ultimately shallow, I found the near total absence of a critique of power and class to be pretty uncomfortable.

That said, it wasn't hard to read, and if you wanted a comforting romance about healing from assault (which, fair warning, is very graphic, though not imo gratuitous), it might be for you. And I really liked that the protagonists spend the whole book trying to solve a mystery and do an absolutely abysmal job at it.

I think on some spiritual level, even though this wasn't published until I was an adult, I feel like I read and loved this as a young teen. Reading it now felt like wrapping myself in the coziest blanket of imaginary nostaliga. I stayed up late reading this and read it instead of doing other things I needed to do. It's been a very long time since I have felt this immersed in a world.

It reminded me a little of The Goblin Emperor in its depth of humanity, and its portrayal of cruelty that doesn't make light of it, and, weirdly, I feel like there's some backstory parallels with Gideon the Ninth, although it couldn't be more differently tonally.

There were times were I did find it a little moralizing, and when the writing rang a bit off, but I loved it very much and if you don't like it I don't want to hear about it because it's been retrconned into my cherished childhood lore.

This whole cookbook reminds me of a recipe note in Veganomicon, which advises the reader not to bother serving it to omnivores, and "save this for appreciative vegetarians and vegans." If you're not already pumped about fake meat, skip this.

Most of the book is recipes for meals which include fake meat. The ones I made were pretty good! I generally find that I add more seasoning and fat than she suggests, and of the recipes I've added to my rotation, I don't make any of them exactly as written.

I've been living off the batches of the chili for weeks, with some added veggies and almost twice as much chili powder.

Usually I get recipes intended to have meat in them and do substitutions, which works fine for me, but it was fun to cook from recipes that are on the same page as me from the outset.

The later part of the book has recipes for DIY'ing the meat itself, which is extremely my jam -- I almost always make my own. It's almost all seitan, which is fine by me, and her recipes are great. I love the ground beef, which goes through a stage in preparation which she describes as resembling a "strawberry milkshake" but comes out an appetizing brown.

My only complaint is that I wish she'd given more technical info and instructions for the meat recipes. Seitan has a bit of a learning curve, and, like bread, it makes a big difference if you know what textures feel right. I always have to use quite a bit more gluten than recipes call for because whatever brand I get isn't as glutinous; that's not on her and I know the territory, but I'd be cautious sharing the recipes with people who've never done it before.

As a seitan nerd, I wish she'd explained why she was adding, for example, oat flour or pea protein (which I still haven't found in stores). And I was disappointed that she doesn't use cooked chickpeas in any, which produces my favorite seitan texture.

Overall, I've really enjoyed it and I'll make my version of a handful of the recipes on the regular, which is the ideal outcome for a cookbook.

This was one of those books that when it ended, I missed getting to be in the world. It has a kind of understated, slice-of-life feel, with a lot of detail and reverence paid to the minutia of daily life and community relationships, that felt more prominent to me than the murder mysteries. Addison writes with an immense amout of compassion and tenderness, and for me that is what makes this book, and The Goblin Emperor, transcend what they would be on their face, in terms of plot.

The writing style drops you into the cultural nuances of the society largely without explanation, and you can infer, for example, what different honorifics mean through context. I really really like this and I think overall its very well done, but I think it would be more daunting if I hadn't already read The Goblin Emperor, and there were some points at which I needed a little help. Specifically, I found the sexual mores confusing, and it was important to the plot that they make sense.

I would highly recommend this if you read and liked The Goblin Emperor, but I'd be more cautious to recommend it if you haven't, even though it's not a sequel per say.