Christina Tosi is one of the most popular and well known pastry chefs around. She started a small bakery with Momofuku owner David Chang and turned it into a pastry empire. She’s been a judge on Masterchef and Masterchef Junior, was featured on Chef’s Table: Pastry, and hosts Bake Club. She’s won James Beard awards. She has won us all over with her big smile and her wacky desserts and her upbeat perkiness.
She’s written cookbooks and shared her cookies and ice creams and cakes by shipping them all over and by stocking them on grocery store shelves. She is an inspiration to professional bakers and home bakers everywhere. But where does she get that indomitable spirit?
Tosi’s latest book is not a cookbook, though it does have a few recipes in it, personal ones, ones that help her tell her very personal stories. Dessert Can Save the World is a memoir, a book about her failures and her hard-won victories. It’s her personal rules for living her best life and baking her best cookies. She shares stories of growing up and growing a business. She talks about working long hours in regimented kitchens surrounded by men who doubted her skills and about finding her voice and her people by showing up and being unabashedly herself.
Dessert Can Save the World has a lot of good advice, not just for having fun with your bakes, but for living a fuller, sweeter life. She got a lot of her positivity and heart for service from her mother, and there are a lot of stories about Greta, starting with how the Midwestern mother came into a professional kitchen in New York City and introduced herself to every single person, wanting to know who her daughter was working with. And after heading back home, she sent a small Christmas gift to every person in that kitchen, remembering each and every name, from the dishwasher to the head chef.
Tosi herself believes in celebrations, not just for the big events in life for also for the small everyday moments that so often go by barely acknowledged. She encourages her readers to find the big thing that motivates them and lean into that. She talks about how to get back to your path if you’ve strayed and how to wear others down, the ones who keep saying no, to get them on your team. She is motivated and motivating, wanting people to chase after what makes them happy, and if that is cookies, then all the better.
While Dessert Can Save the World is an obvious choice for anyone wanting to find the motivation to bake more, or to bake professionally, it’s also a guidebook for anyone wanting to start a non-traditional business, for recent graduates, or for anyone struggling to find their place in the world. Tosi can be a little over-the-top chipper at times, but for the most part she moderates her enthusiasm, finding a balance that’s not too sweet.
It’s hard not to be moved by some of the stories in this book. I’m a longtime fan of Christina Tosi and an ever longer fan of cookies, so I was excited to dig into this book. I figured there would be some recipes sprinkled in, but I wasn’t expecting them to be so personal to her. I was excited to read the stories of her time in professional kitchens, but I was even more drawn into the stories that displayed her humanity. Dessert Can Save the World has a lot of solid advice in it, advice for building a business, advice for showing up for people, advice for finding your path. But mixed in with all that is the comfort and warmth and interesting surprises that you find in a really well-made dessert. In a lot of ways, this book feels like a really good piece of cake. (Also, it made me really hungry, so if I have to go out and buy ice cream, I think we all know who is to blame.)
Egalleys for Desert Can Save the World were provided by Rodale Inc. through NetGalley, with many thanks.
