Sugar and Snark

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Sweet Revenge is a uniquely themed, extremely creative dessert cookbook. The subtitle, Passive Aggressive Desserts for Your Exes and Enemies, conveys the premise - the suggestion that one should channel negative energy into baking (presumably instead of something more nefarious). Kill them with kindness via sweet treats instead! The revenge theme is incorporated throughout, with recipe titles such as "Every Day I Regret You S'more", "You're a Piece of Sheet Cake", "I Wish You Were Bread", and "I Ain't Pudding Up With You". My 12 year old pun-loving son would adore this, however, the humor often crosses into immature PG13 territory. Layout-wise, this is an attractive book, the graphics and page design are very eye-catching. It's apparent a lot of time and thought went into the presentation, however the snark and irreverence of it all built up to be too much for my taste. As for the recipes themselves, they vary widely. Some are really strange - like ice cream sandwiches using flaming hot cheetos. sriracha icing, cool ranch doritos sugar, and chicken skin candy. Some call for odd ingredients that I've never heard of and wouldn't know where to begin to find. Most recipe instructions assume one owns a stand mixer (I do not). There were some simpler recipes that I might try, but I'm not sure that actually attempting the recipes is the point. Overall, Sweet Revenge is a niche cookbook/humor book, that is well-executed for the tongue in cheek humor that it's trying to portray, but will appeal to a limited audience.