Ma Vie en Rose: My Sweet Life

This candid memoir gives readers a front-row seat to the inner life of one of American baking's most consequential figures, and it will especially reward anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to turn obsessive precision into a career.

Rose Levy Beranbaum is best known as the author of The Cake Bible, the book that brought  rigorous ingredient science to home bakers everywhere, while also celebrating the benefits of measuring by weight instead of volume.

Here, she turns that same exactness on her own life: a food-averse child in postwar New York who grew into a baker so meticulous she designed her own kitchen equipment when nothing on the market met her standards.

The book is dense with encounters. Beranbaum crossed paths with James Beard, Julia Child, Andre Soltner, Martha Stewart, Maida Heatter, and Dorie Greenspan, among many others, and she writes about them with an opinionated, generous eye. She doesn't flatter indiscriminately, and she doesn't withhold her own frustrations either. The result reads less like a victory lap and more like an honest account of what persistence in a demanding field actually costs and what how it rewards.

There are a fifteen recipes including a lemon poppy seed pound cake and the all-occasion downy yellow cake that introduced reverse creaming to home kitchens. But they're a small part of the whole: this is fundamentally a story, carried by Beranbaum's hard-won expertise and her sharp, sometimes unexpectedly funny voice.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.