Cake From Lucie: Recipes and Techniques from the French Countryside to New York City

From a 165-year-old chateau in Southern France, where she learned to bake alongside her mother, to a small bakery in New York's East Village known for cakes adorned with fresh flowers, Lucie Franc de Ferriere has built a following with visually whimsical, adorned with fresh flowers, and flavored in a style that is less sweet and more subtly interesting than the American norm: fennel in a blueberry loaf, sumac in the strawberry jam layered with chamomile cake and whipped cream, elderflower with lemon.

These are baking projects, not weeknight cakes. The opening recipe, lemon hibiscus mini cakes, requires eight 3-inch mini cake pans; the third, a chocolate stout rosemary cake, begins with infusing butter. The recipes compensate with genuine support: step-by-step photographs appear throughout, and the instructions are detailed enough to carry a careful baker through unfamiliar techniques. The small type is a real inconvenience.

The range is stylishly imaginative: a salted dark chocolate espresso sheet cake, a vegan lemon elderflower cake, a coffee walnut meringue cake, a blood orange olive oil princess cake, a tiramisu charlotte. Alongside them are more accessible entries (a blueberry fennel loaf, salted dark chocolate chip cookies) for when the ambition fits the day.

Transportive photography from Lucie's French farm and personal stories throughout give the book warmth beyond the recipes. An invitation to bake beautifully.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.