DK devours pastry chef Higham's 'one of a kind' debut recipe book

DK has signed The Last Bite: A Whole New Approach to Making Desserts Through the Year, from award-winning pastry chef Anna Higham. 

Publishing in hardback on 5th May 2022, world rights were acquired by DK Life senior acquisitions editor Stephanie Milner from Caitlin Leydon at Curtis Brown.

Higham, winner of the baking category at the 2019 Young British Foodie awards, previously worked at Gramercy Tavern in New York, before joining world-renowned restaurant Lyle’s, where many of her desserts still remain on the menu. She designed the pastry menu at sister restaurant Flor, London, and is currently the executive pastry chef at famed London institution The River Café.

Described as a "ground-breaking cookbook" Higham's new work encourages home bakers to approach creating a dessert through tasting, seasoning and letting ingredients shine. The book also explores key ingredients, season by season, showing readers how to work with fruit, grains, fats and chocolate, to construct a dessert, and interrogate seasoning, structure and texture to magnify flavour and taste.

The book features more than 150 recipes for bakes, tarts, jams, mousses, meringues, ice creams and more than 40 plated seasonal desserts, from a light almond and fig cake in the autumn months to a rich elderflower custard in spring.

Higham said: "This is the book I wish I had early in my career. There were books that told you how to create complex, technical desserts but I struggled to find any that taught me about creativity and got me excited about ingredients. I’ve written The Last Bite to communicate my love of fruit, of butter, of sweetness. I hope that my passion opens up ideas of the readers’ own and offers them a reassuring hand to create something new.

"My goal was to write a beautiful book that serves as much as inspiration as it does instruction. The hope is that people will use it as a source book, looking forward to the next season and which produce is coming. Use what you have to create something delicious. Taste, season, trust your palate – and you will discover how to cook amazing desserts."

Stephanie Milner said of the The Last Bite: "Anna Higham is a truly special chef. She approaches cooking in a tender and thoughtful way that is rare and her writing about food is just the same. Over the last year I have devoured her words as quickly and impatiently as I have swiped her desserts from set – my fork has never once been far from reach – the romance of both brings me so much joy! The Last Bite is one of a kind (the sort of book that every cookery editor dreams to publish once in a career) and it will be a precious jewel on every enthusiastic cook’s bookshelf."