One great cookbook: 'Jam Bakes'

Repeat after me: Jam wants an existence beyond toast. In 2021, master preserver and pastry chef Camilla Wynne published "Jam Bake: Inspired Recipes for Creating and Baking with Preserves." Plenty of cookbooks have taught home cooks how to make jam; others have included recipes for cooking or baking with jam. Wynne's faultless book might be the first to do both and each with sticky, enviable aplomb.

A (jam) river runs through it

Let's start at the end: Those baking recipes in which you will recruit the jam recipes in "Jam Bakes." Before turning to preserving and pastry, Wynne was part of a touring band. Her baking tastes wander wide, courtesy of all those travels. She knows, too, that we sometimes want a baking project and other days crave a simple bake. To that end, Wynne categorizes the books' baked goods according to a difficulty scale from one to three whisks. On the effortless end sits ginger crunch, a Scottish bar cookie with a ginger-y base and a spiky lemon jelly or ginger marmalade topping. Her coffee cake is another one-whisk-level endeavor, its streusel crown hearty with ground hazelnuts and the cake itself laced with raspberry or blackberry jam.

Swing the whisk pendulum, and you land on Black Forest Puffs. A project indeed, they are a head-spinning reconsideration of Mallomars. Wynne's version has a chocolate cookie base topped with a Black Forest jam of sour cherries and cocoa nibs. Over top of each cookie goes a plop of marshmallow, then a glaze of thinned chocolate. Snack attack for Type A adults.

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Your fruit is cooked

Wynne provides store-bought jam substitutes for all the baked goods in "Jam Bakes." Handy in a pinch, sure, but Wynne is a precise teacher. An adventure in jam-making is advisable.

She walks through the microbiology of jams, allaying botulism concerns. She demonstrates myriad ways to test if a jam is done, comparing the sheeting test to a love story "wherein we are looking for the jam to fall in love with the spatula." Steadily and slowly dripping, the jam declares "undying love for the spatula, clinging to it fiercely."

And, oh, Wynne's jam flavor combinations! Raspberry and lambic beer; coffee, date and pear; cherry Negroni, rhubarb and Amarena cherry — inspired, ingenious, insured for success. Should you default to morning slathering with any of these jams, your toast will curtsey in your direction.