Life Is What You Bake It: Recipes, Stories, and Inspiration to Bake Your Way to the Top

"Vallery’s is a great story. She used to be an attorney. But then she turned to baking full time. She was on the Great American Baking Show , which is the US version of the UK’s Bake Off. And she won. But her season was cancelled after an episode or two, because of allegations of impropriety by one of the judges, so we never got to see it. When your only prize is exposure and not money or deals or anything like that, that was a huge blow. So she decided to bounce back and people tried to help her out. She has this great metaphor in here about bread, that it rises, it gets punched down, and it rises again. That comes through in this book a lot. She talks about her experience, how she’s trying to make the most of this opportunity, which was also a limited opportunity. So this is a little bit like one of the books I was talking about earlier in relation to representation. There hasn’t been a lot of representation of people of color writing baking books. Vallery has learned a lot from her grandmothers and her great-grandmothers and aunts, all these women who played an important role in her life. For many years—and probably even now, to some extent—that type of home cooking and baking was not given the respect it deserves. She goes into the history of her family. These were people cooking in their homes, women of color, who were often working for white women. There are a lot of Southern recipes that her family makes. But it’s a great mix because she also spent a lot of time in France, so you get cannelés and crepe cakes and all these French pastries—she even had a macaron business at one point. Mixed with that are a lot of recipes that draw on her Louisiana heritage: crawfish pie, fruit cobblers and stuff like that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She also has a very accessible way of writing, interspersing anecdotes with tips on everything from making biscuits to flaky pie crust. One thing which I think is really cool and innovative—I don’t know how many people have done this—but at various points throughout the book, she offers you an online option, either ‘scan the QR code’ or ‘go to my website and I’ll show you how to do this’ which I think is great. It’s not just a static book. My colleague Aaron Hutcherson, who has cooked some from here, was raving about this pecan Bundt cake, which looks very unassuming, but it’s packed with pineapples and raisins and uses brown sugar instead of regular white sugar. He loved it and his book club went crazy for it. But I think this is also a good beginner-friendly book, too. I hope it’s just one of many we’ll see that give more representation to people who maybe wouldn’t have been given a deal in the past."