The recipe featured below is from Desserts by the Yard: From Brooklyn to Beverly Hills: Recipes from the Sweetest Life Ever, by Sherry Yard, which is a combination baking book and memoir. Each recipe is accompanied by an excerpt from the author’s life, from the A&P Strawberry Sodas inspired by her grandmother to the Banded Layer Cakes she created for the 67th Oscars. The book introduced me to Yard’s recipes, though I was familiar with her work beforehand because I saw her on an episode of “Iron Chef” as one of Wolfgang Puck’s sous chefs. She was in charge of making the various sweets and pastries that would be presented to the judges, and when she decorated the dishes with spun sugar watching her hands form the ethereally golden strands was breathtaking to say the least.

Desserts by the Yard contains an impressive collection of tempting recipes, some of my favorites including Gingersnap Toaster-Oven Tarts with Peach Filling (think high-end pop tarts), Chocolate-Covered Chocolate-Mint Cookies, Apfelstudel (Apple Strudel) and Pistachio Gelato. The Ring of Saturn Peach “Doughnuts” were also a hit, combining delicious ingredients like anise biscotti and macerated peaches into a treat that’s dusted with confectioner’s sugar, then served with vanilla ice cream. Recipes range in skill-level from basic to advanced and I appreciated how several of them allowed me to stretch my culinary knowledge. I had to make the Fig Bars, which are essentially homemade fig newtons, a few times before the texture was just right, for instance. Yet the treats I found myself making over and over again happened to be the ones that satisfied my simpler tastes: President Clinton’s Oatmeal Cookies and Soft Pretzels. The cookies were a huge hit at the office with two dozen cookies disappearing at lightening speed, while two (soon to be three?) batches of pretzels have already made an appearance in my kitchen. With the exception of one recipe, for Forbidden Rice Pudding, I was hugely satisfied with all the dishes I made. Yard even included something for Fido: a recipe for Real Doggy Treats made with honey, wheat flour, cornmeal and chicken stock. My Labrador Retriever certainly appreciated those!

Chapters include: Brooklyn Inspirations; New York City: From Cigarette Girl to Pastry Chef; London Interlude; Go West, Young Gal: San Francisco and Napa; Spago Hollywood; Farmers’ Market Inspirations; Vienna Interlude; Spago Beverly Hills; Chinois on Main; Special Events; and the Academy Awards.