Bharti Kirchner, a native of India, best known for her cookbooks, has combined her interest in food with her cultural background for this too-sweet novel about "desserts and discoveries."

Set in Seattle where Kirchner and her husband live, the novel revolves around Sunya Malhotra, the owner of a small neighborhood bakery renowned for its exquisite cakes and pastries. Although each customer has a favorite sweet, the Sunya Cake, Sunya's own special creation, is the signature confection.

The bakery draws customers from all over the city, described by a local food critic as being "tasty, beautiful, hypnotic and lyrical."

Yet, as the story opens, Sunya is despondent. A large cut-rate bakery chain building nearby threatens to ruin her financially; her Japanese boyfriend not only is totally engrossed in planning demonstrations against the Third World Trade Conference, he also is dating one of Sunya's friends; and her mother, abandoned by her husband when Sunya was born, is now engaged to a man Sunya detests.

Sunya's list of woes deepens when Pierre, her head baker, leaves to care for an ailing partner, a suspicious character appears to be watching the store and Sunya discovers she has "baker's block" and can no longer bake.

Kirchner expends much energy describing the operations of the bakery and the creation of various gooey sweets while Sunya copes with her losses. The plot thickens when the suspicious person outside the store drops a business card from the famous Kyoto Apsara Bakery.

Coincidences begin to mount. Sunya, on the recommendation of her former boyfriend, hires a gifted young Japanese baker who credits his powers of concentration to time spent studying with Mori Matsumoto, the famous baker at Apsara Bakery. The young man persuades Sunya to enroll in a short course in Kyoto where she, in the tidy fashion of a contrived novel, "finds herself" along with the meaning of her name and the father who had disappeared after her birth. She returns to Seattle, full of love and minus her baker's block.

There are so many ingredients in this novel that it never rises. Sunya, as a narrator, lacks dimension, and the other characters also remain inert. By novel's end, this reviewer, languid from the cloying sweetness, longed for something more substantial - like brown rice and fresh veggies.

Joan Hinkemeyer is a Denver librarian and freelance writer.