[Amber's] realized destiny is our gain. Love Bake Nourish is a baking book devoted to changing when and how you pursue you baking through the year. The season's available fruit, flowers, and nuts are blended with honey and different flours [chestnut flour!] to take you on a culinary journey to a different time, if not a different planet. With Amber, processed white sugar is out. Honey is in, which gives your flavor spectrum a new dimension. White sugar taste like white sugar, pound after pound. Honey comes in all those flower-based flavors which you can now match to the fruit and herb ingredients central to Amber's recipes. I look at these recipes and wonder: is this how we all should and perhaps will cook in the future or is this how the Downton Abbey folks relished on country life desserts in that paneled tea room of theirs.

There is something comfortingly old and yet forwardly challenging about these recipes. Ah, challenging? Just in the context of being so different. The recipes themselves are within your reach, I assure you. One page long, maybe a dozen ingredients--and that includes the honey, herbs, and fruits. These are not complicated recipes. They are well written, easily followed. If you happen to need gluten free dishes, you will find them here in abundance. The Simple Nut Flour Cake is just that, simple: eggs, nut flour, butter, honey and salt.

Like many of her recipes, Amber here suggests extensions and options. The cake on its own is lovely but can be adorned with cocoa powder or partnered with fruit. The cake batter can be extended with rosemary or pine nuts or both. You get the sense that each of these recipes is alive.