"The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn’t good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that’s the best we can manage, but at other times we don’t want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, like a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake . . ."

How to Be a Domestic Goddess, filled with more than 220 lavishly illustrated recipes, makes cooking and baking as luxurious as it should be, with recipes for cakes, pies, pastries, and breads, and feeds our fantasies of making sumptuous treats at home.