THE LAST COURSE: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern

Claudia Fleming—pastry chef at New York's swank Gramercy Tavern—is a dessert visionary who has earned a James Beard Award for Best Pastry Chef and two Best Dessert Awards from Pastry Art and Design. Some of her restaurant recipes will be a challenge even for the most practiced home bakers, but they are well worth the effort. The book includes 175 recipes, organized by main ingredients. There are chapters on fruits (recipes include Blueberry-Cornmeal Cakes and Tamarind-Glazed Mango Napoleons), vegetables (Truffled Rice Pudding, Chilled Rhubarb Soup) and sweet essences (Earl Grey Ice Cream), as well as the usual suspects like chocolate (Chocolate Espresso Terrine) and dairy products (Goat-Cheese Cheesecake). Fleming also displays a light touch with such unusual herb-inflected desserts as Bay Leaf Flan. The restaurant's wine director, Paul Greico, has contributed thoughtful wine suggestions for each category. Recipes for the individual items are provided separately, but in an appendix Fleming groups them as they appear on the restaurant's menu and explains their assembly process (e.g., Rose Meringues with Summer Berries, Raspberry Sorbet, and Goat Yogurt–Rose Mousse consists of three recipes, but a composition of all three would be a single dessert at Gramercy Tavern). It's easy to see why these recipes—whimsical without being silly, daring without ever losing their focus on flavor—have won Fleming a reputation as one of today's most talented pastry chefs. 85 color photos. Agent, David Black. (Oct.)

Forecast:With a first printing of 30,000 and a seven-city author tour (with demonstrations), this cookbook's commercial prospects are good. Gramercy Tavern's name should help too; since its 1994 opening, it has consistently made Zagat's top five most popular New York restaurants.