Author is unabashedly smitten with cake

Leslie Miller is in love. With cake.

She is a woman obsessed. When she isn't eating or baking or writing about the thing she loves most, she is thinking about it. Those simple ingredients of flour, sugar, butter and eggs are seemingly in her every thought.

And now, with the release of her book "Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt," her love affair is immortalized in ink, for everyone to follow. However, Miller said it's not a guide to cake-baking as it is so much a chronicle of cake-loving.

"I didn't set out to write a book about baking and that was surprising to people who asked me," she said. "It wasn't meant to tell people how to bake. It was really a love letter to cake."

Miller said her infatuation with cake began with that first-birthday cake and has continued ever since. The book touches on many elements of cake, featuring a little bit of history, interviews with famous cake-creators and stories of Miller's various, oft-entertaining interactions with cake.

All of it is recorded in Miller's distinctive and honest voice, which, by her own admission, also sometimes sounds like the frenzied voice of a sugar fiend.

"It's a huge topic and I could have gone on forever and written many books about it," she said. "But this was sort of the way my brain was going and it turned out to represent the person on the sugar buzz. It was a little buzzy and flighty at times."

The light, unabashed tone of the book is part of what makes it fun to read. It makes the reader think more about something so silly and yet, suddenly so sacred, as a cake. But Miller said she never took cake too seriously, blinded as she was by her love for it.

"I think you always have to take a step back when it's something you are passionate about so that you can give it a truly critical eye, but I don't think I can give cake that critical of an eye," she said. "Even the sheet cake at the grocery store."

The idea of an entire book devoted to cakes came first from an essay Miller did for a college English class she was teaching, which then evolved into her master's thesis. Following a lecture on how to write query letters to publishers, Miller wrote her own query and heard back from an agent.

"I sent it to an agent, who asked me to send a manuscript," Miller said. " I sent a manuscript and she said: 'OK. Let's go.' It was a Cinderella story. It was like magic."