Envy Sweet - Sweet envy : deceptively easy desserts, designed to steal the show

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Whether youre just browsing the first page in an attempt to appear dessert-savvy or you actually own this book, you have in your hands the essential manual to becoming a home pastry aficionado. Legally, I cant make any promises, but I can assure you that these desserts will most definitely cause jealousy among your peers. (What I like to call sweet envy.)

The pages that follow are truly a love letter to baking. (Its not all just an attempt to make your friends swoon over your fancy-pants desserts.) Clearly you feel the love too, as youve almost made it to the first recipe. Dont quit now!

You dont need to be a trained chef to navigate this book, just bring your sweet tooth and a few mixing bowls. And as the adage goes, I hope you dont judge this book solely by its cover. If you do like the cover, thanks for the flattery, but please dont toss the book on a shelf or coffee table to sit there and look pretty. (Full disclosure here, Im quite guilty of superficially showcasing cookbooks because theyre pretty. See: My color-coded bookshelves.) My point is, this book is meant to be read, the recipes are meant to be made, and, most importantly, the desserts are meant to be eaten. I hope you dog-ear this book left and right, spill vanilla extract and smear egg yolk on its pages. Sweet Envy should proudly bear grease stains and wear, the battle wounds of a well-used cookbook.

If youre ready to create a pastry presence, this book will equip you with the techniques to impress. The confections range from sweets easy enough to bake in your sleepalthough baking in your sleep is highly unadvisableto cupcakes adorned with intricate fondant succulents. Whether its a quick go-to cookie recipe, or something a bit more complex, these recipes are a solid foundation to build upon. Flip through the pages, get inspired and inevitably youll discover a new technique that you can add to your baking arsenal.

Most importantly, make mistakes while you bake and learn from them. Stain your clothes with food coloring, get fondant and buttercream stuck in your fingernails. Know that any mistake made in the kitchen can happily be eaten. Whatever your skill level, the outcome remains the same. These are desserts that look just as amazing as they taste. Make a statement with the simple yet genuinely delicious Strawberry Shortbread Stacks (pg. 37). Get your sweet-and-salty on while celebrating candy with the Take-A-Break Bars (pg. 49). If entertaining is your thing, showcase the Piata Cake (pg. 59) at a colorful fiesta. Impress at a sophisticated tea party with the Earl Grey Tea Cakes (pg. 41). Use unexpected flavors and colors while turning art into cake and cake into art. Daydream away as you add your own personality to a Watercolor Celebration Cake (pg. 79). With this book as your guide, youre poised to create some incredible desserts and a few show-stopping accompaniments, like the D.I.Y. Cake Stands (pg. 145). Before you realize it, youll have garnered more than a few oohs and ahhs.

Go ahead, cause a stir with your mother-in-law or turn heads at the school bake sale. Youve earned it. Flex those creative baking musclesbeing envied never tasted so sweet.

The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking youve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.

Julia Child

I n the beginning baking was a means to eat sweets whenever I wanted. Id stand in the kitchen in a tutu and my moms version of an apron (one of my dads oversized button-down shirts on backwards), crafting any excuse to bake up something sugary and sweet. Eventually I outgrew that pudgy little girl phase. (And, sadly, the tutu as well.) But I still had a passion for spending time in the kitchenthe social epicenter of our family. I continued to bake in the, Hey, I love frosting, lets go make a chocolate cake kinda way. Not the, I must excel at this and attend the finest pastry school in the country way. Im not a pastry snob, Im a pastry lover.

Instead art and design became my career path, and after high school I fled to the Big Apple to study at Parsons School of Design (No, not for fashion, but graphic design), busted my ass working internships and spent endless nights hand-painting tiny color swatches that, to anyone other than my instructor, would have all been the same color blue.

Dont get me wrong, aside from probably sniffing too many chemicals and the male-to-female ratio, I loved art school and still adore everything about design. Its my profession and my passion, and because of that I never really considered my love for baking a career possibility. I considered myself a sweets superfan, baking for fun and eating everything sweet NYC had to offer.

It was in my senior year of college2005, to be exactthat I had my culinary epiphany. There I was, in Union Square, right in the middle of one of those endless street fairs. Not a cool street fair that featured handmade jewelry and local goat cheese purveyors. It was one of the tourist traps that arrives and disappears in a single day, leaving heaping mounds of trash in its wake. In between classes and in need of a sweet pick-me-up, I found myself at this street fair, hopelessly wedged between a vendor selling watermelon and another dealing patterned ponchos and toenail clippers. Then I saw it: At the corner was a small French crepe stand. (I use the word French loosely here, fully knowing the people who ran that stand were about as French as french fries.) Naturally I ordered a Nutella and strawberry crepe, as we can all agree that Nutella is a gift from the gods, destined to be paired with sliced strawberries, all wrapped up in a cozy crepe. One taste and it hit me. It was there, on the corner of 13th and Broadway, that I had tasted my future. And it was delicious.

Maybe I was just a starving college kid, but having that delicately folded crepe changed my perception of sweets and gave me a craving to investigate baking on a deeper level. It was about the simplest thing you could havethat delectable crepebut it was a breakthrough moment for me. I realized two things: One, the most basic combination of ingredients can create a most delectable treat. And two, if sweets can bring this much joy to someones life, I want to be a part of it. The trouble was, eating sweets until I got a bellyache wouldnt pay my student loans. Plus, I still loved art and I was well aware of the difficulties in switching my career path. I wasnt ready to throw in that turpentine-stained towel just yet. So, with a design degree and plenty of ambition, I set out to find a job as a graphic designer. For a year I designed at a highly regarded cosmetics company, but it turns out that I dont really care about skincare.