On November 21, 2020, a young woman in Brooklyn named Tanya Bush began to keep a diary of sorts. On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. “No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety,” she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, “No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self.” January 7, 2021: “No. Milk chocolate tart with hazelnut praline, devoured in the wee hours of the morning in a stress-induced panic, did not begin to ease my outrage at a congressional adjournment less than twenty-four hours after an attempted coup.”

Baked goods were not making Bush happy, she affirmed repeatedly in the following months, compiling a deadpan catalogue of tantalizing desserts. And yet, as she details in her forthcoming cookbook, “Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking,” her commitment to baking, and to recording what she produced and ate, ultimately changed her life. “I was twenty-three, depressed, unemployed, and adrift. I just wanted to make something,” she writes. “Sometimes a single year can mark a sudden and definitive shift. In this one, I decided to become a baker.”

The book forfeits the puckish immediacy of Bush’s Instagram dispatches for more earnest, effortful prose. “I devoured slice after slice alone, feeling sticky, ethereal joy,” she writes, about baking banana bread during a spell of malaise. She charts her aspirations—and her romances, with characters she calls The Boyfriend and The Crush—through the seasons, as she moves from her home kitchen to an ill-fated internship in Italy to her first professional baking gig. (She is now the pastry chef at the Brooklyn restaurant Little Egg and married to The Boyfriend.) Recipes for dark-chocolate-and-toasted-coconut cake, soba-cha panna cotta, Concord-grape clafoutis, and other confections punctuate her drifting between listlessness and purpose.