Attaining a royal title may not have originally been on Danielle Sepsy’s bucket list: She might have been content opening a successful online and wholesale bakery during the COVID-19 pandemic and racking up hundreds of thousands of adoring social media followers. But after opening The Hungry Gnome, she competed on HBO’s The Big Brunch, and was crowned the Scone Queen. This led to fulfilling another ambition: sharing her love of baking with a wider audience in a cookbook. The fruits of her efforts can be found in The Scone Queen Bakes: 100 Recipes for Scones, Muffins, Cookies, and Cakes From the Founder of The Hungry Gnome.
Sepsy’s love for food and cooking permeates each page, starting with a heartfelt introduction about her lifelong delight in baking (as an 8-year-old, she begged for a KitchenAid stand mixer for Christmas). Her award-winning scones get a whole chapter that’s organized by flavor profile, one for each month of the year (e.g. lavender lemon for May, apple walnut for September and chocolate chip for December). Recipes for spreads and accompaniments make this chapter particularly enticing: honey butter, lemon curd and easy clotted cream make her scones just as suitable for dessert as they are for breakfast. And for dog lovers, Sepsy offers a recipe for puppy scones.
Subsequent chapters focus on muffins, cookies, brownies and bars, rolls and breads, and snacking cakes. Many of the recipes have roots in Sepsy’s Italian heritage and tight-knit family, such as fig cookies (the “star” of her family’s holiday table), rainbow buns (merging the almond flavor of the classic Italian American rainbow cookie with the softness of a pillowy bun) and toffee almond brittle (a sweet-salty blend of flavors and textures Sepsy calls “totally addictive”). Each recipe is accompanied by a short description. Some are nostalgic, such as for the chocolate chip crumb loaf that reminds Sepsy of the Entenmann’s cakes she recalls from her Long Island, New York, childhood; others offer helpful tips, such as the suggestion to “double down on the banana flavor” in the banana chip crumb cake by swapping banana pudding mix for vanilla.
Gorgeous, colorful photographs of mouthwatering baked goods are sprinkled throughout. The Scone Queen Bakes will brighten any baker’s cookbook collection—and should secure Sepsy’s royal title in perpetuity.