Sweet Farm!: More Than 100 Cookies, Cakes, Salads(!), and Other Delights from My Kitchen on a Sugar Beet Farm

“Recipes for sweets pour out of me like any bucket of sprinkles that gets handed to my children: swiftly and with great joy,” writes Food Network star Yeh (Home Is Where the Eggs Are) in this joyful collection. Yeh’s fun, personality-filled confections represent a unique culinary melding of her Jewish/Chinese heritage with her husband’s Midwestern farmland roots. For cookies, there are red bean newtons featuring Chinese sweet bean paste and hamantaschen-inspired jumbo thumbprints. A section on “Dessert for Breakfast” features a buttery potato dough perfect for “Chocolate-y Swirly Buns” and puffy potato doughnuts. Peanut butter fudge pie gets a makeover with tahini while the “Sorta Weird Seven-Layer Bars” encompass matzo meal, bagel chips, and chocolate. The chapter on sweet salads is perhaps the most unusual, featuring a “Candy Bar Salad” assembled from chopped candy bars, cream, pudding, and apple slices, and another of roasted rhubarb, strawberries, and pretzel streusel with yogurt and sumac. Yeh proves a fearless, out-of-the-box baker with a breezy voice. Home cooks who are looking to get creative should check this out. (Mar.)