What Christina Tosi Says Her New Memoir Is Really About

Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi has already shared plenty of her dessert chain's iconic recipes in her growing collection of cookbooks, but now the pastry chef is sharing a different type of wisdom with her fans. Tosi's memoir "Dessert Can Save the World" introduces readers to the kinds of recipes you wouldn't find at Milk Bar ... or any bakery for that matter. The recipes are what she calls "Dirty Dessert Secrets." As Tosi explained to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, these include creations like Tang Toast, which consists of white bread spread with margarine and sprinkled with powdered Tang, and her high school go-to, a microwaved Honey Bun wrapped around a Snickers bar.

It may seem odd for an award-winning pastry chef to highlight desserts that require no technical skill and are made primarily with candy, but that's exactly what Tosi was going for. To Tosi, dessert is anything that can bring people together and create memories, and that means Tang Toast can be just as meaningful as a six-layer Milk Bar cake.

The title of Christina Tosi's book, "Dessert Can Save the World," may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but page by page Tosi breaks down that it's really "the spirit of dessert" she's referring to. In an excerpt from the memoir shared by publisher Penguin Random House, Tosi describes the spirit of dessert as "the relentless, unflinching commitment to finding or creating joy even when joy feels hard to come by." According to Tosi, that isn't the flour, sugar, and butter at play, but rather the idea that making and eating dessert allows people to celebrate big and small milestones, and at the same time can also provide moments of comfort at any point in life.

So why then does dessert save the world? The answer, as Tosi summed up in her Tonight Show interview, is that "it's a reminder that we need joy, that joy matters, that knowing ourselves, finding these moments that connect us to ourselves, to other people, to the world, these are the connective tissues that make life worth living and fighting for." You can read more of Tosi's musings about dessert and life in her new memoir, now on sale in bookstores.