Baking up some great reads!

I'm kicking off today's posts with one of my favorite recipes. I started making it one summer and told my grandmother how good it was and that I would bring her the recipe. Canny grandma replied, "Or you could just bring me the cake!" So, for the next several years, I rarely visited her without a cake in tow! The following reads center around food and made me crave everything from sparkling cider to jam-infused cake!

I've been a fan of Allen's writing since I read and fell in love with Garden Spells. This book centers around Emily Benedict, who moves in with her grandfather in a small town steeped in mysteries, and Julia Winterson, a baker in the small town looking to escape. In this offering, I loved the way Allen blended the real and the magical (although the whole town buying into the magic seemed a stretch at times) but the ending came too quickly and the book felt unfinished. I need a sequel - and one of Julia's cakes!



My favorite feel-good movie is You've Got Mail, so when I saw a book advertised as the written equivalent, I had to buy it! I agree with the assessment on several levels: there's mistaken identity, romance that doesn't proceed immediately into raciness, and a protagonist that knows her craft... and loses her establishment. The setting was one the author obviously knows and she paid tribute to the food and culture of the area. The one thing that fell a little flat for me were the two male characters. The male protagonist suffered from the author's attempts to make him appeal to every woman. He had a six-pack, an English accent, was intelligent, came from money, cooked, was good at sports... it was just a little too much to swallow in a single person! On the other hand, his rival was too flat - too self-interested and one-dimension-ally "bad" to be believable. A fun read - fluffy as the icing on the cover - but not to be taken too seriously!