Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn Your Passion into Profits

Sprinkles cupcakes founder Nelson (The Sprinkles Baking Book) serves up saccharine business advice in this trite outing. She shares her own career story, writing of how she learned to bake out of homesickness when her father’s job required the family to live abroad, went on to an unsatisfying career in finance, attended pastry school, and opened Sprinkles gourmet cupcake bakery in California in 2005. The generic advice that accompanies the biography is couched in baking metaphors: “Test the appetite: is the world hungry for your idea?”; “Inject with filling: build a beloved brand”; “Stock your pantry: streamline your operations and prepare to scale”; and “Remember that the convection fans of reality may blow your passion sideways as it rises. But as long as you keep your trays spinning, your dreams will bake to perfection, and you will reach your very own sweet success.” Personal questions to spur self-reflection (“food for thought”) end each chapter, but Nelson’s advice doesn’t go beyond the basics—“take a leap,” “trust your intuition”—and the baking references overwhelm. Sprinkles fans will do better with Nelson’s cookbooks. (Nov.)