Why ‘More Than Cake’ is a baking cookbook like no other

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