Cake and Eat It: A Restaurantland Romance

Has Anzi found a new recipe for love?

Anzi loves to bake. She's the pastry chef at the quirky Rose and Thorn restaurant in Oregon. What she loves about baking is the precision and predictability. If you have the right ingredients and follow the recipe exactly, success is certain. There's zero risk.

It's the same strategy she uses with Austin, her good-natured chef boyfriend and rising star in the Portland fine-dining scene. They're in a stable relationship, with no surprises, just the way Anzi likes it.

In her downtime, she hosts a pretend baking show on a community access channel. Campy, funny and no-budget-with bedazzled cardboard appliances and a volunteer crew-Anzi is a natural in front of the camera.

Life is good.

Until Roland-her impossibly handsome, almost-ex from culinary school days and the perpetrator of "the cake incident"-reappears. He offers Anzi the chance to shoot a real pilot for a national cable TV baking show in New York. Turns out Roland's boss at EatTV, a new channel devoted to food, saw Anzi's wacky late-night show. It's an incredible, life-changing opportunity, but there are two problems.

First, Anzi is still furious with Roland for his betrayal three years ago, and second, she is terrified of flying.

Roland offers to drive her across the country, and with Austin's blessing, Anzi and Roland set out on a road trip, but she doesn't plan to enjoy a minute of it. She only needs Roland long enough for him to deliver her to the New York broadcast studio.

That lasts until Wyoming.

Cake and Eat It, the third book in the Restaurantland Romance series, is an enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, found-family story crackling with offbeat humor and featuring an eccentric cast of cooks, servers and customers, set in Portland, Oregon, in the fabulous pre-internet 1990s.