Local author Judith Fertig celebrates the sweet life in new novel, cookbook

You could say that local author Judith Fertig’s life lately has been an embarrassment of riches — and cakes.

Fertig, the author of numerous cookbooks (Prairie Home Cooking, I Love Cinnamon Rolls, 500 Fish & Shellfish Dishes) and dozens of national magazine articles, is celebrating this summer’s publication of two new books: a novel, The Cake Therapist (Penguin, $16) and a hardback cookbook, Bake Happy (Running Press, $27.50).

Earlier this week, the local chapter of Les Dames de Escoffier International, a society of professional women involved in the culinary arts, hosted a cocktail party to honor Fertig’s achievement — she wrote both books simultaneously.

“I had actually started the novel several years earlier, but I would set it aside for long periods until I had an epiphany one day that if I didn’t finally get serious about it, it would never be finished. The new cookbook, Bake Happy, came a few years after that. But for quite a while, I was juggling both projects at the same time.”

Fertig is quick to point out that her novel, which has a food-related theme, is not a culinary mystery (“It would have had to have at least one murder,” Fertig says. “Mine doesn’t) and does not include recipes.

“If my readers want some of the recipes I write about, they can buy Bake Happy,” she says.

She did, however, get the inspiration for a future murder mystery when she attended a writers conference and found out that the person hired to do the cooking for the event had nearly died from mothball poisoning.”

“Who knew?” Fertig says. “They had to find a substitute cook who used a lot of potatoes in her dishes.”

Fertig used her hometown, a small suburb outside of Cincinnati, as the inspiration for the Cake Therapist, which follows a pastry chef who, when her big city life falls apart, returns to her hometown.

Fans who fall in love with the characters depicted in Fertig’s novel will be able to get better acquainted with them in her next novel, The Memory of Lemons.

“I got a two-book deal,” Fertig says. “But I’d like to turn this into a series.”

She might need a murder.