While Baltimore is home to several bakeries, it isn't as if Baltimore is some sort of cake capital in the country. Even the Today show competition she writes about is made up solely of local bakers. It was almost as if the book was both too large in scope-it is a celebration of cake, rather than a straight up memoir- and too small-she rarely ventures beyond the confines of the Baltimore area. Some chapters (especially the more historically-focused) despite the obvious research that went into them seemed sort of thrown in at the last minute they were very short and without much of the commentary the rest of the book was thick with. She also skipped around a bit chronologically, thoughts on her visit to Charm City Cakes are divided into at least 3 different chapters, which was odd and seemed out of order. While these events were divided into different sections and chapters, she referred back to events that occurred in earlier chapters/sections fairly frequently so even though the topic changed, the chapters (she cutely calls them layers) really couldn't stand alone as individual essays. This gave a sort of scattered feel to the book. I think what put me off was how the author kept switching back and forth between personal memories (occasionally not cake related, she writes at length about her mother and grandmother's cooking), cake history, contests, cake shop visits and other cake related topics with little in the way of transitions. The concept was certainly compelling (a book celebrating cakes rather than simply being about making them) and it was edited by Betsy Lerner. I wanted to like this book more than I actually did.

Let Me Eat Cake by Leslie F. Miller