To make mathematics palatable for the lay reader, the author must sweeten the pill. There are many ways to do this, but Eugenia Cheng is surely the first to have approached the task literally, writing a math book in which almost every chapter begins with a recipe for dessert.

Math and cooking are similar, she writes. Both involve ingredients and methods. Just as a baker needs to master the principles of his ingredients, a mathematician must learn the principles of numbers. Puff pastry is an example of how basic ingredients can make something sophisticated and delicious. Likewise math can get very complicated and fascinating with only a few simple concepts. And when you adapt a cake to be gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free or Paleo-compatible, you are modifying the notion of what it is to be a cake, in the same way mathematicians generalize from, say, a particular triangle to a family of triangles.

Cheng never quite overeggs her metaphor of the mathematician as chef, however, and her tone is clear, clever and friendly. Even at her most whimsical she is rigorous and insightful. Potentially confusing ideas are expressed with a matter-of-fact simplicity: “As long as your new idea doesn’t cause a contradiction,” she writes, “you are free to invent it.” The math is presented in bite-size chunks and made relevant through personal stories from Cheng’s school years in Britain and life in America, where she is scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Math and cooking, however, have some important differences. Mathematicians value the process more than the ingredients, and Cheng’s aim is to explain how mathematicians think, rather than focus on the mathematical objects they think about. Her own recipe for the book is to prep the reader with explanations of concepts like abstraction, generalization and axiomatization, before serving up her signature dish: category theory, her own research area, which she calls “the mathematics of mathematics.”