Butter Cream (Paperback)

What happens when a 50-something fiction writer decides to ditch it all and attend professional pastry chef school for a year? In writing that brings to mind the work of journalist/chef Michael Ruhlman, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School tells the story of eleven months of whipping, spreading and creaming in the pursuit of perfection. When Denise Roig set out to do this -- a lark, she thought -- she had no idea what it would cost and what it would give back.

Butter Cream is the chronicle of an intense year of learning and tasting, dramas at the stove and in the locker room. It's about fights, friendship and competition, fallen cakes and rising doughs. And sometimes, unexpectedly, it's about the sheer joy of baking. It's a memoir sprinkled with delicious pastry recipes that also includes trips back to Roig's mother's and grandmother's kitchens and to her own complicated relationship with all things sweet.

Denise Roig moved to Montreal from Los Angeles in 1989 when her twelve-year-old daughter, Ariel, convinced her they should run away so Ariel could join the circus. Her daughter went to study with Montreal's Cirque du Soleil and Denise spent the next twenty years as a Montrealer. Roig wrote professionally for twenty years before publishing her first short-story collection. She also taught magazine writing and editing at Concordia University and story-writing for more than a decade in Quebec high schools. She has published three collections of critically acclaimed short stories -- A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, Any Day Now, and Brilliant -- as well as the delectable non-fiction memoir Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School