The Pastry Queen: Royally Good Recipes from the Texas Hill Country's Rather Sweet Bakery and Cafe

This cookbook offers recipes for dozens of classic treats like oatmeal cookies, carrot cake and pecan pie--but often with novel twists: pineapple and coconut swirl through the carrot cake, the pecan pie takes the form of a brownie and the oatmeal cookies are fashioned into ""crisps."" Still, most of the recipes are pleasingly old-fashioned and sweet enough to send an unsuspecting baker into diabetic shock. The Grasshopper Pie calls for an entire cup of sugar, plus marshmallow creme and hot fudge sauce, and the Bananas Foster Shortcakes deliver sugary banana flavor amped up to maximum volume. The author is the proprietress of The Rather Sweet Bakery and Cafe in Texas, and she offers several signature Lone Star state desserts: a rich Fredericksburg Peach Cream Cheese Tart, crunchy Texas Pralines and Texas Big Hairs Lemon-Lime Meringue Tarts, with meringue piled as high as a Houston debutante's coif. The cookbook also offers a few non-dessert selections, mostly soups, salads, quesadillas and the like. Though these dishes are tasty--it's hard to object to Prosciutto Tostadas with Shrimp and Parsley or a warm, pleasing Wild Mushroom Soup--it's the sugary-sweet and fun-to-bake Texas-style desserts that make this rather sweet, and rather expensive, cookbook worth the splurge.