One great cookbook: Natasha Pickowicz’s ‘More Than Cake’

You want the recipes in a cookbook to work. All the more so in a baking cookbook. This is the obligatory minimum.

A proper cookbook should also swell your imagination and expand your kitchen confidence. Natasha Pickowicz’s “More Than Cake: 100 Recipes Built for Pleasure and Community” succeeds on all counts, supplying both inspiration and a grounding sense of the altruistic ways in which baking can bind.

Baking for good

Pickowicz is a longtime pastry chef turned writer who for years has harnessed her baking prowess and that of her restaurant-world pals to raise money for a variety of charitable organizations through bake sales. She takes the “for pleasure and community” part of the book’s subtitle seriously. “Creating recipes is a loving, community-based act in constant communion with our world,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Baked goods are part of my commitment to community building.”

And so, for example, Pickowicz devotes an entire chapter to “modern layer cakes” — shareable creations to delight and encourage communing with either your loved ones or the people in your community at large. The chapter is formatted as a choose your own adventure. Select a cake base, say, a black sesame chiffon cake. Then a soak for that base, like maple and vanilla milk. Fill it with, for example, sweet and spicy hazelnuts and frost it with Italian espresso buttercream. There are 21 of these base items, so the permutations are, well, you do the math: near-endless.

Flavor, considered

That wild menagerie of layer cake foundations is simply the door leading to a wonderland under the pastry-kitchen stairs. Pickowicz’s carrot cake is striated with coconut flakes; she tops her pine nut sablé cookies with a smear of funky Taleggio cheese; she transmutes miso soup into a danish; rose water and mezcal are conjoined in a deeply, darkly caramel flan.

Whether you’re baking a toasted vanilla bean pound cake for nibbling across a week yourself or blowing it out for a party with a caramel chocolate chip ice cream bombe, “More Than Cake” offers a solution for endless occasions. “Baking brings me closer to my parents, friends and my neighbors,” Pickowicz writes. “Baking is more than cake.” This book is ready to prove that to you, if you let it.