On the fuming lip of Stromboli, where kitchens sweat and tempers run hotter than the lava glow, competitive sugarwork is as lucrative as it is perilous. Twenty-six-year-old Céleste Marot and her scrappy team, the Saffron Wolves, are one burn-scar away from winning the Vesuvius Cup—a televised gauntlet of spun glass, caramel cages, and flame-kissed pastries. But the Wolves need a partner who can temper chocolate with a surgeon’s patience and talk back to a camera, which is how Céleste ends up binding herself to Dante Rinaldi, an infuriatingly gifted Neapolitan chocolatier whose smirk lingers like dark cocoa on her tongue. Their on-screen rivalry is ratings gold; off-screen, it’s gasoline waiting for a spark.
When a midnight fireworks rehearsal goes wrong and torches Céleste’s apartment above Pasticceria Marot, she’s forced to accept a hush-hush consultancy with Luca Varzeni, the island’s most enigmatic food-tech magnate. Varzeni’s unsettling fascination with Céleste’s heirloom Bourbon vanilla cuttings—smuggled decades ago from Réunion by her grandmother—sets whisk to bowl on a scheme that could lock independent kitchens out of Sicily’s sugar supply and ruin everything the Wolves have flambeéd to build. As Céleste and Dante trade heat in steel prep rooms and on black-sand beaches, they’re dragged into a maze of nondisclosure clauses, backroom council votes in Lipari, and recipes that carry more power than any contract. Steamy confessions, sabotage disguised as mismeasured gelatin, and a ruthless bid for culinary control collide in a finale where the last reveal isn’t plated on porcelain—it’s a truth that could scorch or save the future they’re both suddenly daring to taste.
Like Roselle Lim's tender food-kissed romances meeting Mia P. Manansala's kitchen cunning, this serves molten chemistry, tactile craft, and high-stakes culinary politics in one decadent bite.
Gorgeous ingredients, uneven bake. The pacing wobbles from televised heats to NDA chess, and the momentum cools right when it should bloom.
The novel keeps tracing one sticky thread: "recipes that carry more power than any contract." It's a clean thematic throughline, setting artisan craft against corporate appetite without turning either into cardboard. The vanilla cuttings read like family lore made physical, and the island councils become theaters where heritage and profit glare at each other.
Sometimes the metaphor is so on brand it feels arranged, but the book returns, again and again, to a human-scale question: what do you owe the hands that taught you to stir, and what do you risk to make something new?
As a character study, this is half triumph, half tease. Céleste's pride protects a tender core, and Dante's practiced smirk is a shield that drops in tiny, satisfying slips. Their chemistry is undeniable, especially when a camera is in the room, yet some beats repeat: the "we're rivals, not partners" refrain circles back a few times too many.
Still, when they let the other taste a failure or a memory, the book hits a richer note. I wanted just a few more of those cracks where the light gets in.
Smart structure. The narrative toggles between Céleste's precision and Dante's swagger, using the Vesuvius Cup heats as clean act breaks while threading the Varzeni plot through quieter interludes; the result is a rhythm that rarely stumbles.
Prose-wise, the sensory detail is measured rather than syrupy, and the dialogue snaps without turning quippy. A late flurry of legal maneuvering arrives briskly, but the chaptering keeps it digestible and the kitchen scenes continue to anchor the book in tangible motion.
I adored every volcanic, sugar-scorched minute of this. The island feels alive, kitchens roaring like surf while the Vesuvius Cup cameras prowl, and I could practically taste the smoke on the vanilla.
Céleste and Dante are combustible in the best way, all prickly competence and aching restraint, their banter snapping like hard crack. When the fireworks mishap rips away her home, the tenderness that creeps in under the snark made my chest go melty.
What surprised me most was how vividly the culinary world is weaponized. Varzeni's interest in those Bourbon vanilla cuttings isn't just villain sparkle; it's a pressure system, a storm bearing down on every independent oven in the archipelago.
The set pieces are luscious: caramel cages gleaming, chocolate tempered to a mirror, black-sand beach confessions where the tide fizzles against cooling sugar. The stakes never feel silly; they feel personal, earned, and hot.
I closed the book flushed and happy, convinced that recipes can be revolutions and that love can proof in heat other stories would shy away from. More, please.
