Dessert Can Save the World by Christina Tosi

Dessert Can Save the World

by Christina Tosi

The James Beard Award–winning founder of Milk Bar and host of Bake Squad shares her personal stories and wisdom for igniting passion, following your joy, and creating a satisfying life.
 
Dessert connects us heart-to-heart like almost nothing else. It brings us together in good times and bad, celebration and solace. It marks big and small milestones and creates memories of comfort and joy. And Christina Tosi, the founder and CEO of Milk Bar, believes it can save the world.
 
Does the combination of sugar, flour, and butter have some magical ability to fix all the craziness of our modern existence? Of course not. Tosi knows a cookie is just a cookie—but bringing the joy a cookie holds into every area of your life most definitely can. The spirit of dessert—the relentless, unflinching commitment to finding or creating joy even when joy feels hard to come by—is what can save us. And then we, in turn, can each save the world.

Tosi shares the wisdom she learned growing up surrounded by strong women who showed her baking’s ability to harness love and create connection, as well as personal stories about succeeding in the highly competitive food world by unapologetically being her true self. Studded with personal and unorthodox recipes, Dessert Can Save the World reveals the secret ingredients for transforming our outlooks, our relationships, our work, and our entire collective existence into something boldly optimistic and stubbornly joyful.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

4 of 5 stars

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Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Dessert Can Save the World is a delightful collection of chatty essays, reminiscences, observations, and some recipes about almost everyone's favorite part of the meal, dessert. Due out 8th March, 2022 from Crown Publishing (Rodale) on their Harmony imprint, it's 240 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

Author Christina Tosi is a pastry chef, foodie, content creator, and gregarious dessert missionary and the vibe throughout the book is encouraging, fun, and unrestrained. The recipes are scattered throughout the book (there's not an index for the "just give me the recipe" sort of folks - so be forewarned). The entire book is full of rapid fire memories and high octane stories of birthdays saved, challenges met, and desserts and baked goods shared.

She seems like a force of nature. It does seem clear that she's an extremely giving and compassionate person, and she cares about her employees and her customers. I liked reading the memoirs and the included recipes are appealing and I saw no glaring errors with measurements or directions. I did -not- prepare any of them before writing the review. Because of the bouncy full-on-high-gear narrative, the whole has a stream-of-consciousness feel and a sort of staccato rhythm and allegro fortissimo (fast and loud) presentation which I personally found exhausting after a while. For me, it was a book I enjoyed very much as a bio/memoir, but not so much as a recipe book. This is one I found myself picking up and putting down with pauses in between reading sessions.

Four stars. This would make a good selection for particularly enthusiastic foodies, public- or possibly school-library acquisition. There are no photos or illustrations in the book. Graphically it's very simple, but the author brings her own energy in truckloads.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 3 March, 2022: Finished reading
  • 3 March, 2022: Reviewed