An IACP Award winner and a San Francisco Chronicle best cookbook of the year, written by a chef who spent more than a decade in Copenhagen and then had to reconstruct the whole thing from a San Francisco kitchen. Nichole Accettola opened Kantine because she could not find the bread, the buns and the buttery pastry she had eaten every day abroad.

Seventy five bakes, organised by occasion and arranged from simplest to most involved, so the book works whether you have forty minutes or a free Sunday. Cardamom buns and rye loaves, layered cakes, the cookie tin chapter, and the savoury side that Americans usually miss entirely: smorrebrod, morning and midday plates, the actual food of a Nordic day.

It is a genuinely warm book, and the sequencing means a first attempt is likely to succeed, which is the fastest way to make somebody a baker.