Baking cakes is Ruth's passion.

Indeed, this passion is so strong that she banishes stress by visualizing herself in the "warm hollowed-out center of a Bundt cake."

Ruth has a real need for a cake fantasy as the story opens. First, her husband, Sam, loses his job because of a corporate takeover. Then her itinerant piano-playing father, who had abandoned his wife and daughter when Ruth was 2, has broken both wrists in a fall.

Ruth feels the only option is to bring her father home, but her mother, who hates the man, is already living with Ruth. Ruth and Sam also have a self-absorbed adolescent daughter.

Ruth tries to cope with her totally helpless father and her parents' steady bickering. But her husband's announcement that perhaps he won't look for a job, but will instead renovate sailboats, forces her to escape into a cake-baking frenzy. A chance suggestion from her father's physical therapist, coupled with the family's worsening financial situation, forces Ruth to view her cake as a way to save her family.

In a feel-good turn of the plot, the cakes unite the family - and Ruth's parents even end their enmity.

The final savory ingredient is an appendix containing some of Ruth's most delectable recipes.



Joan Hinkemeyer is a Denver librarian and free-lance writer.