Mia Hopkins is straight up one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I could talk to her all day about books, baking, mothering, and life in general. The book she chose, “The Proposition” by Judith Ivory, is a sort of gender-swapped take on “My Fair Lady.” I loved reading it, and I really loved talking about it with Mia.

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Host: Julie Strauss
Website/Instagram/Facebook

Guest: Mia Hopkins
Website/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/The Baker’s Notebook Podcast

Books discussed in this episode:

The Proposition by Judith Ivory
The Baker’s Notebook Podcast
Duck, Duck, Porcupine by Selena Yoon
Bee-Bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park
Zenobia Neil on Best Book Ever Episode 035
Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Father Gregory Boyle
Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship by Father Gregory Boyle
Homeboy Industries
Thirsty: An Eastside Brewery Novel by Mia Hopkins
Trashed: An Eastside Brewery Novel by Mia Hopkins
My Fair Lady
Pygmalion myth
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The Lady Sherlock Series by Sherry Thomas: A Study in Scarlet Women, A Conspiracy in Belgravia, The Hollow of Fear, The Art of the Theft
The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas
Delicious by Sherry Thomas
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bridgerton miniseries on Netflix
The Duke and I by Julia Quinn (The Bridgerton series is over a dozen books long, so if you like this one, you’ve got a great binge ahead of you)
The Indiscretion by Judith Ivory
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite
Breathe the Sky by Michelle Hazen
Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher
The Los Angeles Conservancy
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty
Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
Salt Fat Acid Heat Netflix Series
Home Cooking Podcast with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway

Discussed in our Patreon Conversation: 

Paul Hollywood
The Great British Bake Off
Baking with Kim-Joy: Cute and Creative Bakes to Make You Smile by Kim-Joy
Christmas with Kim-Joy: A Festive Collection of Edible Cuteness by Kim-Joy
Proof by Mia Hopkins is in The One Who Got Away Anthology, edited by Kristina Wright
Rosie’s the Vet’s Cookie Chicken
Swedish Princess Cake
Croquembouche
Choux Pastry with Craquelin
Mexican Concha Bread
Japanese Melon Bread
Mardi Gras King Cake

(Note: If you shop using my affiliate links, a portion of your purchase will go to me, at no extra expense to you. Thank you for supporting indie bookstores and for helping to keep the Best Book Ever Podcast in business!)

EPISODE 036 TRANSCRIPT
MIA HOPKINS ON “THE PROPOSITION” BY JUDITH IVORY

Hello, bookworms, welcome to the Best Book Ever, the podcast where we talk about your favorite books. I’m your host, Julie Strauss, and today I’m so pleased to talk to the queen of Procrastibaking herself, and one of my favorite romance authors, Mia Hopkins. Mia lives in Los Angeles with her family and writes lush romances starring fun, sexy characters who love to get down and dirty. She’s a sucker for working class heroes, brainy romance and wisecracking best friends. Her award-winning books have been featured by many publications, including The Washington Post, USA Today and Entertainment Weekly. I love talking to Mia about baking and books and Los Angeles breweries. Today she joined me to talk about why “The Proposition” by Judith Ivory is the Best Book Ever. 

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JULIE STRAUSS: Hi, Mia, welcome to the Best Book Ever podcast.
MIA HOPKINS: Hi, Julie. I’m happy to be here.
JS: Mia, I think you first caught my eye because of probably your most famous hashtag, which is procrastinating. And the second I saw there is a romance writer who is famous for procrastinating. I knew right then, oh, this is my people. Where did you learn to bake?
MH: I didn’t grow up baking. My mom was a nurse. She worked at night and she was a pretty good cook, but she never took the time to bake. There was just no time. I have an older sister, when she moved out of the house, I would go visit her when she was in college. And one of the things that I remember we would do together is that we would bake. We used to watch a lot of the old PBS cooking shows together when we were growing up. And like we always wanted to do it, but we didn’t have any of the ingredients. We didn’t have a baking pan. The oven was for baking fish and meat, but never a cake. So when she had a kitchen and she had access to ingredients, that’s when I started baking. She’s ten years older than me. I must have been eight or nine. And it was a big treat to be able to do this. We didn’t do it a lot. But I remember making like a gingerbread house when I was about 10 with her and she had this old mixer and it started to smoke because the dough was so stiff. And I was afraid we were going to set her tiny kitchen on fire. As I got older, it became something that wasn’t a big deal to put together some cookies or a cake or a little bit of bread. And it’s just a way to pass the time, have something delicious and a really great way to procrastinate. A friend and I just started a podcast on baking and with our practice, it’s so much. Like, it’s a ridiculous amount of baked goods. And so I’ve just been doing deliveries and trying to find people to like throw these baked goods on. And at this point, it’s fun to get a free loaf of bread, but now I’m like, no, no, we’re done. That’s good. Thank you. 

JS: Have you ever baked until you’re sick of it, as you get ready for your podcast? Do you get to the point where you cannot look at, like the Brazilian cheese bread, for example? Did you get to the point of like, oh, my God, I can’t ever look at that again? 

MH: Not for Brazilian cheese. No, I could look at a Brazilian cheese bread basket forever. But our next episode, I believe it’s our next one, is French macaron. We did that for Valentine’s Day. And I don’t think I want to look at another French macaron again because I was trying to get the technique down. I did it seven times. I could build a house out of macarons. I’m good for now. I’m good for now. There’s only so many I can eat of those. 

JS: What prompted you to start the podcast? 

MH: The podcast is called The Bakers Notebook, and it’s a weekly podcast where a friend and I bake these recipes that we find online and then compare our notes. So we bake side by side and talk about what worked and what didn’t. The thing that I really love is I’m doing this with one of my close friends, Stacie, and she’s a biochemistry professor at UCLA. And so I get to learn about baking from somebody who understands it on a very deep level. And we’ve always bonded over it. And one of the things that has been hard during the pandemic is just spending time with friends. It’s like you have to make an appointment. You have to find a way to connect online. You have to do social distancing with this. Now, we have an excuse to talk every week and to talk about what we were going to talk about anyway, which is baking. So it’s been a really fun way to connect. As you know, as somebody who has a podcast and who has a number of episodes under your belt, you connect with listeners. You have friends and family who might listen every week. It becomes a way to bond with people that we really need right now. 

JS: You are a mom to a person I believe is quite possibly the cutest toddler in the history of the universe. 

MH: Oh, she knows it. She will agree with you.

JS: What’s her favorite thing that you make? 

MH: Oh, gosh. You know, she likes to bake with me. And I have come to embrace the chaos. It’s so chaotic and fun to bake with her. I kind of divide recipes into things that she does and things that I can do so she can whisk and she can break eggs now, pretty well. Yesterday we made lemon cupcakes. So this has been a really great way to teach certain concepts, measuring and counting and then making itself is really tactile. So we’ve been enjoying time in the kitchen every day or every other day trying new things. 

JS: What about reading? Are you a big reading family with your daughter? I know she’s very, very young, but do you read to her a lot? 

MH: Yes. We read constantly together. The sidewalk service of our county library has been a life saver. 

JS: You have sidewalk service?
MH: No, no, they don’t come to our house, but the libraries are open to their patrons, so which we reserve everything online. And then the call to schedule time to pick up your books and then the librarian comes out and puts your books in a brown paper bag, puts it on a table, they go inside, you go pick up. We’ve done it all pandemic. It’s been great. 

JS: That’s what ours is doing, too. And thank God. I would absolutely have been even more lost without it.

MH: Yeah. And it would be too expensive to give her the amount of books required if we didn’t have access to a library. 

JS: What’s a current favorite of hers?
MH: Let’s see, she’s two and a half. We really like the books of Selena Yoon, who does these really bright, beautiful, kind of like comic book-style books. One of them is “Duck, Duck, Porcupine.” It’s just the adventures of a big duck, a little duck and a purple porcupine. And they’re just bright panels and very simple, funny stories. Like they open up a lemonade stand, they try to get a kite out of a tree. Very, very simple. But it’s as parents, we read a lot of these books and I actually laugh during these books. And so that’s surprising to me that you as an adult can be entertained by them. And she loves these books. Another one we read recently is called Bee-Bim Bop!, which is by Linda Sue Park. And it’s about a mom and a daughter who are making Korean food together. And she loves it because she’s my child.
JS: What was your reading life like when you were a kid?
MH: I was a big library fan. Where I grew up, there was a really nice local library also run by L.A. County, and my mom was not a big reader. My parents were not big readers when I was growing up. They had magazines. They had Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. My mom had nursing magazines, but they made it a point for us to go to the library every week and we could get 12 books, exactly 12. And so I remember getting 12 picture books as a little kid. And then as I grew up, I could get 12 chapter books if I wanted to. And I did. And I read them and it was great. 

JS: A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed one of your very close friends, Zenobia Neil, and I mentioned that I was going to be talking to you. And she said immediately, what did she choose? And I told her about this book we’re going to discuss today, “The Proposition.” And she was very startled. She when I asked her, what do you think Mia chose? And she said for sure she would have chosen a Father Greg Boyle book. 

MH: Wow. 

JS: Yeah.
MH: You know, there’s that belief that the right book finds you at the right time, and so, you know, it’s like reaching into a river. You can never read the same book again, you know, just because of who you are as a person. And I absolutely love Father Greg’s books. I mean, there’s “Tattoos On the Heart.” And then his next one was “Barking to the Choir.” When I read those books, I was I was a high school teacher. I grew up in L.A. and I was working with young people, and when I left teaching, I wanted to write. I was selling a few things, but I still wanted to feel connected to the community. So I was volunteering at Homeboy Industries, which is Father Greg’s organization in L.A. I had signed up because of my teaching background to be a tutor. I was a teacher for 13 years – I thought I could be of help as a volunteer. When I talked to the volunteer coordinator at the time, she said, oh, you love teaching. What are you doing now? I said, well, I’m I’m working on some books. I’m trying to sell this story, a couple other books. And she said, well, we really need somebody to work in our development office right now. We need somebody to work on marketing materials. And one of your jobs would be to talk to trainees and people who have completed the program about their personal stories so that we can share them with our community, with our donors, and with possible donors on our website, in our newsletter. And I was like, wow, I’ve never done anything like that. My husband had worked as a journalist for a long time. He was a newspaper reporter. So, I always admired the work of people who did this kind of thing. But I thought, well, if I want to be a writer, maybe this is one of the first steps I should take. And so that led to, I think I was a volunteer there for maybe two, almost two years. And one of my job was to do hours and hours and hours of in-person or phone conversations with former gang members, different people who worked with Homeboy who had graduated from the program, men and women, all kinds of people. And as I was listening to these stories and like learning more about Father Greg. I thought these stories are amazing. These stories are heroic. There are people battling bigger demons I could even conceive of and coming out alive like that in itself is a miracle. I wanted to find a way to connect the work that I’ve been doing with Homeboy, with the books that I was writing. I feel to my core that romance is a life-affirming genre. And for me anyway, at times when I was feeling low during this very difficult, unprecedented year, is that romance kind of retrains my brain to feel optimistic about things. 

JS: So tell me how you found how you came across this book, “The Proposition” by Judith Ivory.
MH: I read this, I believe, in 2011. So it’s been a while. I am not a lifelong romance reader. I didn’t pick up romance until I was in my thirties. I started when a friend gave me a Kindle and I booted it up. And almost as a joke, I downloaded some romance.  I was like a snotty English major. We don’t read genre fiction.  And so I had this Kindle. When you have a Kindle for the first time, you have a private space to read things that you wouldn’t have read before. It’s so easy to download things, to try things out, to be more adventurous as a reader. But I don’t really get into romance until I was feeling under the weather and my husband bought me a Highland romance novel from the drugstore when he went to go get me a Sprite. I tore through it cover to cover. And then I downloaded eight hundred more on my Kindle and I tore through those. I cannot remember when I made when I made the switch to Victorian historical. But Judith Ivory was, if not the first, the one of the first after I went through my Highland historical phase. And I remember just being dazzled, just dazzled by her writing. She was so much fun to read.
JS: For our listeners who maybe haven’t read it, would you describe what this book is about?
MH: So, “The Proposition” is basically a retelling of “My Fair Lady” or the Pygmalion Myth or “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw. That exact same telling, except that the roles are reversed. The heroine is a linguist and charm school, or finishing school teacher. And the hero is seriously my favorite hero in all of romance. He’s a Cockney ratcatcher named Mick Lemore. And the basic gist of the story is they run into these two gentlemen gamblers who find out who she is and take a look at him. And then they bet each other that she cannot turn Mick into a lord or a gentleman in time for this big social gathering where they want to pass him off as this titled Lord, even though he is a Cockney ratcatcher with no education. And I just love this book. I love it so much. There’s something about the Victorian setting that I enjoy a lot. I think I was traumatized as a high school student in English class, like I didn’t get very good grades, whatever. We had Jane Austen, I tried really hard. I kind of skipped over Regency for a while. But the Victorian world – it’s historical, but there’s so much that’s familiar about it, too. I find a lot more science in Victorian. 

JS: Yes. 

MH: Also, a lot of the women are able to have professions. So, for example, in this book, Edwina is a linguist. She’s able to have this like professional and intellectual life. She led me to reading Sherry Thomas, who has some books set in the Victorian era.
JS: She’s the one who does that Lady Sherlock series? Those are so good!

MH: Have you ever “The Luckiest Lady in London” or “Delicious”? She has these romance novels that are super sexy, set in the Victorian era, and they’re the ones that I remember are all about couples in jeopardy, like couples who have broken up and then they’re getting back. Together, they’re so good.
JS: You said before we started recording that as you were going through “The Proposition,” it feels like such a snapshot of the time. And I want to know what you mean by that. 

MH:I think when I said snapshot, I thought of how it connected with me at the time. I just really wanted to lose myself in a world with these two very developed characters, like clashing against each other, but simultaneously drawn together at the same time. I like that it’s a little bit slapsticky. I like the clothes, which is like one of my favorite aspects of any historical romance is the clothes. It opens in a dress shop, and I’m thinking of Edwina’s Cinderella moment at the ball where she has this dress that Mick was able to scrape together to buy for her. I’m thinking of his outfit when he actually has to go do work as a ratcatcher and how he has all these bells and whistles and he has all these animals. All these ferrets and all these terriers. Just amazing. I love the setting. I love the details of this book. It’s just something that I really needed at the time I picked it up. And it just, you know, like it made a huge impression on me. I think that it’s just a fun. I never really liked the story of Pygmalion as a myth or, you know, like the play itself is fun to read, but I don’t really feel a lot for the characters. “My Fair Lady” is also a beautiful movie, great music. But like Henry Higgins is not, you know, not romance material to me. 

JS: Do you think part of the appeal is the swapping of the genders? I was thinking that through the whole book, the fact that the sculptor in this book was a woman who changed the whole thing. It took out the sort of ick factor that I’ve always had with “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” a man, molding a woman.

MH: OK, so the book opens, like I said, in a dress shop. And like the thing about Mick, he’s a fun character. He’s a he’s a man who loves legs. And so it opens with this huge like section on the male gaze, where he’s just talking about legs and how much he loves them. And like you think, oh, no, I’m going to be reading that book. It’s going to be icky. It’s an old romance book. It’s going to be icky. But like you said, she swaps it really quickly. Where now are our female heroine sees Mick and starts to have, you know, funny underwear feelings about him as well. The thing that I love about this is that there’s this goofiness to the book. She becomes obsessed with his mustache. She’s obsessed with his mustache. He has this like these dark hair and these bright green eyes. He has this dark mustache. And I think that if you like, counted the number of mentions with mustache, you would be in the thousands. She’s obsessed with his mustache, which I think is hilarious because he’s obsessed with her legs. And you take this like very intellectual, kind of like always in her head character. And you have this man who brings her down to earth very quickly. And like now she becomes a physical being where she’s thinking about body. It’s so great. 

JS: Tell me what you like so much about the ending. Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn’t read it. Maybe give us five minutes to skip ahead. 

MH: Well, here’s the thing. Spoiler alert. I like that it’s bananas, but I am conflicted about it. OK, when I told you I wanted to read this book for your podcast, I was thinking about how much I love these characters. As a reader, I kind of gloss over plot because I fall in love with characters so deeply. The ending of this book is bananas. It’s bananas and I’m conflicted about it because we have this character of Nick who is the son of a single mom. He has 14 brothers and sisters. He grew up in Cornwall. But in this ending, it turns out that he is the rightful heir to a very large fortune and that the woman he thought was his mother was his wet nurse who kidnapped him. It turns out that he’s the long lost grandson of this duke. That made me kind of annoyed. Because, you know, I felt like this book was about wish fulfillment, as all great romances are. He’s poor, he becomes wealthy, she’s lonely, she finds a partner who respects her and sees her for who she is. But then there’s this level that, you know, why couldn’t they have gotten this by being who he is? Why can’t he just be the son of a Cornish wet nurse? It’s almost like he was so smart and so intelligent and so able to mimic the highborn people of this story because he was highborn. Do you know what I mean?
JS: I see.
MH: And so, yeah, I wanted him to be able to game the system by being who he was. It’s almost like the ending – you could put any ending in there and I would still love this, but the ending, I’m really conflicted about.
JS: What I liked about the ending was the way it was like a lottery of wish fulfillment. Not only was he the rightful heir all along, which is absolute catnip for me, but also it had to be that way. She was willing to go with him to be the wife of a ratcatcher. She was like, you’re worth it. But then it turned out that he was who he was so that he could give an entire estate to his family of 14 people. And I just thought, oh, this is this is an author who’s so in love with this character and she just wants to give him everything on the planet. 

MH: I love that there’s that “Pride and Prejudice” feeling to it right at the ending where it’s just amazing. You just dazzle. That’s greater than anything they would have imagined. I wanted him to be able to get that, not because of his birth, you know what I mean?
JS: Yes, I know exactly what you’re saying.
MH: I wanted him to be able to fool that old man.
JS: It was amazing how easy it was to gloss over the whole kidnapping plot because, well, he was with a better family, so it’s kind of OK. 

MH: Yeah, it’s kind of OK. They were poor, but they were happy.
JS: Right. I get that it’s technically illegal. Whatever. But that was how much this book thrilled me. I was able to close it and think that was the right thing for the wet nurse to do. 

MH: There was that really great scene, when they were dancing, practicing the dancing, and he tells her about his childhood and how wonderful it was and how he misses being so close to the ocean and running wild with all his siblings. And it’s everything that she never had, you know. He’s the oldest of 14, which I can’t even imagine. And she says, is that why you where you act like a king all the time? You know, almost making fun of him. And he says, but I am the king. I’m the king of Mick Lemore and you are my queen. And that is echoed in in the books that I’ve written. I think Mick is in every hero I’ve written because of that line. I’ve never been – oh, I’m going to get thrown out of romancelandia. But I’ve never been a big fan of billionaires and princes. And like I like underdogs. Scrappy underdogs. You really don’t get any scrappier than a Victorian rat catcher with a terrier named Magic and a ferret named Freddie. He is willing to make adjustments to his personality. He is willing to admit when he’s wrong and he does it gracefully, knowing that that doesn’t take away from who he is. Like that is a really well-developed character. He’s not educated, but he outsmarts her constantly. I love that character. I know a lot of people right now are big fans of the Bridgton series on Netflix. I watched the first episode. I read Julia Quinn a while ago. I know a lot of people love the books, but I don’t know too much about them. I know that the first episode is called “Diamond of the First Quarter,” which is a phrase that you can counter a lot in historical romance. It’s like a very old phrase used to describe the clarity of diamonds. A very clear diamond is a diamond of the first quarter. What I love about “The Proposition” is that it opens with this French saying, which is all these wealthy ladies who liked Mick before the book started had a yearning for mud. They wanted to get their hands dirty with a working class man. And he found it fascinating, but also horrifying at the same time that he was objectified in this way. But he also benefited in a way. But it made him feel dirty that they saw him as a dirty person. I love that contrast that no, he is not a diamond of the first water, as they say. He is mud. But I love him.
JS: There’s a real brilliance, I thought, to the language. The fact that she is a linguist. I mean, what are the odds? It’s really kind of incredible. 

MH: What are the odds? 

JS: It’s stunning that she’s a linguist. And here comes this dashing man with this crazy, mixed-up accent that she immediately pegs. What I thought was so cool about the progression of their relationship was how he used language, sometimes for her and sometimes against her, and that he was able to mimic the highborn posh accent when he when it suited him. And then sometimes he slipped back into his accent, either to goad her or turn her on. The play of language was so clever and so funny. And I think what you said about the slapstick aspect of this book – when it gets serious, a ferret escapes in the ball. 

MH: They’re chasing a ferret at the Duke of Arles’ ball. 

JS: It’s so great. Have you read a lot of Judith Ivory?
MH: I think I read “The Indiscretion” a while ago. I think I would like to reread that one again. But none of the books that I’ve read of hers have made such a deep impression as this one, just because I love the hero so much. 

JS: So what you said you didn’t come into romance reading until later in general. Where do you go in romance these days? Do you have a preferred subgenre? 

MH: I go back and forth between historical and contemporary. And again, I tend to go towards Victorians. So I really like Olivia Waite’s series right now.
JS: “The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics.” 

MH: That’s right. And yeah, it’s a series. The next one is “The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows.” Let me look it up so I don’t -yes, I love her writing. And I recently read a book by Michelle Hazen called “Breathe the Sky,” which is a contemporary about this man, a biologist who has to supervise a construction site in the Mojave Desert so that they don’t crush turtles. She falls in love with the foreman of this construction site. They’re putting up electrical towers, I believe. And again, it’s that working class hero kind of intellectual heroine. And they’re both loners. They’re both turtles. And they come out of their shells, fall in love, which is all I want in a romance novel. It’s perfect. Yeah, that’s one recent book that is just a total, total treat for me. Yeah. So I go back and forth between contemporary and historical and then also outside of romance as well. I mean the father Greg Boyle books are a pretty sharp left turn. Is that an exception for you.
JS: Are you always all over the place with your reading?
MH: No, I’m all over the place. I always have been. Yeah, Father Greg Boyle’s are non-fiction. They’re not linear biographies of his work with Home Boy, but more like snapshots of different stories and people that he’s met during the formation of this program. I do like I like fiction and nonfiction. I’ve been reading a book called Eternity Street. By John Mack Faragher, which is like the history of violence in Frontier Los Angeles. The founding of the city from its very earliest origins is like this lawless vigilante – I mean, it’s not just the Wild West. It’s the furthest west you can go at the time. It’s a great, super violent book of history that I’m enjoying. 

JS: How did you come across that one?
MH: I’m a member of the L.A. Conservancy. They had to shut down a lot of their tours and events because of the pandemic. But I’ve always been fascinated with L.A. history, and it just came up on one of the GoodReads lists and I wanted to check it out. I love food writing. I don’t know if you’re a big food writing reader.
JS: Oh, yes.
MH: Who do you like to read? I’m always looking for new food writers to read. 

JS: I am in the middle of “The Cooking Gene.”
MH: How do you like it?
JS: I love it. I mean, not only does it just make you starving, but he can write.
MH: Michael W. Twitty.
JS: Yes, that’s it.
MH: I follow him on Twitter. Yeah, he’s fascinating. I have to check that out. I just finished “Salt Fat Acid Heat” by Samin Nosrat. I like her whole philosophy of cooking. She has a Netflix show that’s one of my comfort watches. And then she has this podcast that ran all of last year called “Home Cooking.” It was a podcast for people struggling with what to make at home while they’re stuck at home.
JS: Will you tell our listeners where they can find you? Yes, my website is www.miahopkinsauthor.com. I’m on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook @MiaHopkinsXOXO. Also, if you’re interested in listening to the podcast, it’s available on Spotify, Apple and Anchor. It’s the Baker’s Notebook. You can find us also on Instagram and Twitter @BakersNotebook. And our website is the BakersNotebook.com. 

JS: And that one’s also really fun because I like that you show both pictures of your bakes.

MH: It’s so much stress. Listen, she is so good. Do you understand? It’s like, who said this on Great British Bake Off? It’s like showing up to the prom in the same dress as somebody else, but they’re like a Brazilian supermodel. It’s great. I love it. I got it.
JS: So she’s got the food styling down.
MH: She’s so good. She’s just a really, really good baker. And part of the reason, you know, like my ulterior motive for doing this is just to pick her brains every week. She’s an amazing baker. She’s so good. I’m here, how about two more filters on my break? There have been some creative lighting situations for sure.
JS: But you know what? That’s actually my favorite thing, because to see what a home baker looks like and that can come out two different ways is so encouraging. Because then you just think, screw it. I don’t care how it turns out, because both of these people, and I listened to the episode, and both of them like the way it tasted. 

MH: Yeah. That’s all that matters. You’re going to get a treat at the end. You’re fine. Fine. 
JS: Carbs will get us through this.
MH: Ride that train. Yeah.
JS: I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been so fun, as always. It’s so fun to talk to you and I hope you will come back sometime anytime you want to talk about a favorite book. 
MH: Thank you so much for the invitation. I had a really good time, Julie.

Thanks for listening, Bookworms. For more information on this episode and links to all the books we discussed, please go to our website BestBookEverPodcast.com, or follow the podcast on Instagram @BestBookEverPodcast. I’m your host, Julie Strauss, and you can find me everywhere @JulieWroteABook. Remember when you’re doing your book shopping, please help support indie bookstores and this podcast by using my affiliate link at Bookshop.com/Bestbookever. 

Thank you for joining me today and I will see you at the library.