Every time I cook from Stella Parks’s 2017 book BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, I find one predictable pattern emerges. I reach the downtime of a given recipe — whether it’s a devil’s food chocolate cake baking away in the oven or a chocolate pudding setting in the fridge — and I lean against my kitchen counter, flipping through the 397 pages thinking to myself, “This really is the perfect baking book.”

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve