When he was a child, Irvin Lin's favorite dish at St. Louis' Ted Drewes was an apple pie concrete, which had an entire slice of apple pie mixed into the frozen custard.
Now, in his first cookbook, "Marbled, Swirled and Layered," Lin honors that treat with a dessert inspired by it, Blueberry Crisp Buttermilk Ice Cream. It is the same idea but different, a piece of blueberry crisp blended into ice cream.
Now living in San Francisco, the 43-year-old Lin said another dish based on a St. Louis tradition did not turn out as well.
"I was going to do a variant of a toasted ravioli in the book," the Parkway Central grad said from Chicago, where he was on a book tour. "I was going to do a chocolate cookie version of ravioli. I was going to make it with chocolate pasta, mascarpone cheese filling, and it also had a cookie crumb outside. I was going to dip it in caramel sauce.
"When I made them, they looked awful. I didn't think about it at the time, but when you deep fry them they look like chocolate briquettes. There is no food stylist in the world who could make that look decent."
That dish did not make it into the cookbook, which has been well received. The New York Times cited it as one of the six best books on baking to come out this year.
As is becoming increasingly common among cookbook authors, Lin started as a food blogger, a way to share his passion. Six years ago, he began a blog called Eat the Love, partly as a place to put the recipes his friends were always requesting whenever he made something.
At the time, he was working at a design company; most of his clients were restaurant chains.
"I had an epiphany when I was working for a major burger chain. I realized that I was literally designing garbage; it's what people throw out," he said.
That realization led to an emotional crisis of sorts ("I went home and watched 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' for three hours in a row"). His friends suggested that he do something that he really liked.
Though he still does design work, the majority of Lin's time is now spent as a freelance food writer, photographer and recipe developer. After three years of writing his blog, he began to wish for something more physical, more permanent. So he acquired an agent (fellow blogger Shauna James Ahern introduced him to hers) and wrote "Marbled, Swirled and Layered."
"It is desserts that are marbled, swirled and layered. For me, the book was really about combining flavors in desserts. There are a lot of people who try to combine flavors in desserts and they throw everything together, and they end up tasting muddy," he said.
The recipes in Lin's book use different flavored doughs in combination, so you can distinguish each taste, or different flavored layers. But the flavors he combines are not always the ones you might expect.
Sweet Potato Buttermilk Pie With Rosemary Crust. Lemon Ginger Bars With Tequila Meringue Topping. Banana Crunch Beer Brownies.
"There are certainly recipes in the cookbook that are very traditional, like chocolate and vanilla," he said. But "I am always interested in trying new things. I like to push the boundaries a little bit."
Lin's parents came from Taiwan, which does not have the tradition of post-meal sweets that we have. "For us, desserts were, like, orange slices after dinner," he said.
Even so, he looked to the flavors of his ancestral home for one dish: Ginger Eclairs With Black Sesame Pastry Cream and Five-Spice Craquelin.
Other ideas come from closer at hand. San Francisco is a food-oriented city, and his neighborhood _ which he amusingly refers to as The Gastro, a nod to the popular district called The Castro _ is a place of particular culinary note. A famous ice-cream-and-pastry shop is located a block away, along with a bakery that draws crowds from around the city, a Neapolitan pizzeria and an ultra-trendy market that specializes in local, seasonal ingredients and hard-to-find delicacies.
It was at the trendy market that he happened to buy Seville oranges, with which he had never worked before. That happy occasion led him to develop Seville Orange Bars With Salted Shortbread and Gin Meringue.
Other ideas come from the restaurants he goes to. He rarely eats dessert out, he said, but always looks at the menu to see what flavors they are putting together and what ingredients they are using that perhaps he has not tried before.
Lin cooks as well as bakes, but baking is his passion. He began when he was 9 years old, when his parents sent him to a baking class during the summer. They made snickerdoodles. He had never had a snickerdoodle before, and he was instantly hooked on the idea that he could create something so wonderful.
"Throughout my life, I would bake whenever I was stressed out. I call it procrasti-baking," he said.
But mostly, baking is more deeply satisfying for him than that.
"For me, the idea of baking is it is inherently all about the pleasure of baking. ... When you bake, you almost never bake for yourself. You always bake for others. And baking is not something you have to do. You have to eat, but you don't have to have dessert.
"So baking is pure pleasure for me."
