Pastry Temple: Baking with Inspired Flavors (A Pastry Cookbook for Croissant, Brioche, and Puff Pastry)

by Christina Wood

Overview

Make out-of-this-world, showstopping bakes by perfecting the Three Pillars of Pastry (brioche, puff pastry, and croissant) with the steady hand of a self-taught baker as your guide.

In this pastry cookbook, you'll find 30+ innovative, sweet and savory recipes crafted by the highly sought-after Temple Pastries bakery.

JOIN THE CULT OF THE CROISSANT! In this creative pastry cookbook, master three foundational dough recipes: brioche, puff pastry, and croissant. Then build confidence with 30+ recipes that bring those bakes to life in all their mouthwatering glory.

Author Christina Wood—self-taught home baker turned owner and benevolent leader of Temple Pastries—swoops in to demystify those intimidating, picture-perfect pastries that may have felt too challenging to attempt. Ideal for experienced home bakers, you'll find step by step guidance in clear, unambiguous language; detailed timelines for planning your day; and plenty of process shots to bestow necessary confidence.

Includes savory and not-too-sweet flavors such as:

• Chinese Five-Spice Kouign Amann
• Gochujang Babka
• Harissa-Sweet Potato Rosette Tart with Feta
• Cheesy Blistered Tomato Croissant

Sweet tooths are covered too!

• Poached Quince Tarte Tatin
• Creme Brulee Donut
• Sumac-Roasted Strawberry Cheesecake Croissant

We know you've already mastered cakes and cookies. Now take your skills to the next level with these three mouthwatering pillars of pastry!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632175502
Publisher:	Blue Star Press
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	7.52(w) x 10.27(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

CHRISTINA WOOD has more than 15 years of experience working with pastry. After many years as an accountant, teaching herself how to bake at home ignited a passion for learning pastry techniques, and with it, demystifying the secretive world of pastry professionals. After landing her first professional pastry job in Seattle in 2015, she then branched out on her own in 2018, opening the brick and mortar Temple Pastries in October 2020.

Read an Excerpt

Building an Altar to Pastry

When you enter my bakery, Temple Pastries, you immediately know you’re in a pious place. It has soaring ceilings, a soft echo off the concrete floors, and giant windows flooding the white walls and cascading plants with light, even on the darkest of Seattle winter days. This interior reflects my dedication to and reverence for pastry. A perfectly executed croissant, an unbelievably light morsel of brioche—these are my reasons for being, my calling. But I don’t come from a long line of pastry chefs or gourmands, so how did I get here?

I must first tell you about the tulips. I spent my childhood on a rural Midwestern stretch of land surrounded by woods and bordered by a wide, slow-moving river. I spent as much time as I possibly could outside, roaming the forest, getting to know the habits of the little snakes and bunnies and birds that lived there, committing to memory every tree, every glen, every ring of mushrooms that sprang up. There was a giant maple tree that stood alone in the middle of a field that I had a certain affection for. Half of it had been incinerated in a bonfire that got out of control, but the other half was just as alive as ever. At the base of this tree, a handful of tulips popped up every spring. There were no other flowers on the property apart from the usual dandelions and lawn daisies, and this little outcropping of maybe eight individual tulips appearing each year seemed to me like magic. Each spring I anticipated seeing them, and when they finally arrived it felt special, like nature had built an altar to honor this beautiful place I loved.

While I may have been a free-spirited romantic on my own time, my home life was quite the opposite. I grew up in an extremely Protestant home. My life was structured around church and hard work. It was expected of me to show my dedication to God by keeping on the straight and narrow path, getting straight A’s in school, participating in sports, and attending Sunday school and all manner of extracurricular church activities. Self-discipline, structure, and piety were the cornerstones of my upbringing. Earthly pleasures were seen as frivolous, since our true reward of heaven was waiting for us in the afterlife. As a child, I honestly didn’t hate this, but I lived in constant fear of disappointing God and my parents. My love affair with the tulips was a strictly private matter, one I buried within myself.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I started to break free from this fundamental upbringing. I was living in Gainesville, Florida, under the pretense of getting an accounting degree, but really I was doing all the things I wasn’t allowed to do growing up. As I met more people outside the church community, I realized there was a whole world of experiences and ideas I had never encountered. I was enthralled! I came out as queer. I started reading feminist literature. My friends were artists and musicians and punks and anarchists. The structure and self-discipline I had learned and lived up to that point seemed to serve no purpose, and I threw them away with abandon to pursue a creative life. Those tulips were calling to me, a promise of deeper meaning and connection that I had been missing, and now I could live it out in the open.

It was during this phase of my life that I discovered baking. I had never had an interest in food before (see above re: earthly pleasures), but my best friend had started getting me into cooking, and from there I ventured to the sweet side of the kitchen and fell in love. It had never occurred to me that I could choose a career path that wasn’t traditional, practical, and guaranteed to make me a comfortable suburban living. Dry, rule-based accounting wasn’t really doing it for me. But baking? Now that sounded like the perfect career choice. I began dreaming up cakes and pies and cookies in my head, letting my imagination run wild. But because I was so focused on the creative aspects and had no foundation of the rules of baking, I had many, many failed concepts. One that stands out in my memory is a brownie recipe I tried to make vegan, and I ended up with an inedible brick of baked cocoa-avocado paste! I began to realize that pure creativity without a solid base of skill would only lead to continued failure. So I hunted down anything and everything I could find about the rules and science of baking and practiced at home as often as I could. This was the beginning of something, I could tell, a path to the future I wanted for myself. I supposed the next step was to get a job at a bakery, so I dropped off a paltry résumé and a loaf of home-baked challah at a place in town. That was enough to get me the job.

I threw myself into that work. I was granted a lot of creative control and would make an ever-changing menu of weekly cake and pastry specials alongside the hand-mixed sourdough breads we made there. I picked up swing shifts just to learn new things and asked a million questions to find out why instead of just how, and I soon realized my thirst for knowledge would not be quenched in a college-town bakery. It was time to take the next, most terrifying step: move to a real city. I thought Seattle sounded nice. One of my friends was planning a move to Portland, so I sold all my stuff and jumped in his car with a suitcase, a very small nest egg, and a dream. I didn’t know anyone in Seattle, had never stepped foot in it or even looked at it on a map, but all signs pointed to this being the right move.

As luck (or fate) would have it, I landed a job at a well-known bakery run by an award-winning chef, and all sorts of gaps in my knowledge were filled in. It was apparent my skill level was behind most people who worked there; I didn’t go to culinary school or have years of experience. The pressure was on; this was my sink or swim moment. I pushed myself so hard I would come home and cry at the end of the day just to let it all out. It was in this environment that I came back to what was instilled in me as a kid: self-discipline, structure, and piety—but this time for pastry.

These qualities that I abandoned to do some necessary self-discovery and healing were exactly what I needed to revisit, not because I was afraid of the consequences of not living that way, but because I was excited about what I could accomplish and create using those tools. I worked with intention every day. I treated my jobs like school. I still read everything I could find regarding pastry and bread. And while I studied, I didn’t try to bury my creative pursuits but instead treasured them, so when I branched out on my own there was a deep well of inspiration to dip into, along with the skill level to pull it off. The art of pastry is what brought me fully into myself. I have reemerged, a blooming tulip, building an altar to the place I love: my very own pastry temple.

How to Use This Book

This book is meant to be the exact book I was searching for when I was learning how to make pastry on my own. It’s not difficult to find inspirational and creative baking books, but what I really wanted to know was the theory and technical skill behind the creativity.

There are three basic pastry doughs covered in this book, what I refer to as the Three Pillars of Pastry: brioche, puff pastry, and croissant. With these doughs, you can make so many different pastries, and when mastered, they create a very solid foundation to build on. Each section will begin with a pillar recipe. This will include theory and technical know-how for executing that dough. I highly recommend you practice the pillar recipes before moving on to the more embellished recipes that follow. Following the pillar recipes, you’ll find savory and sweet applications for each dough, the inspirational and creative ways to use them. You can follow these exactly, or use them as a jumping off point for your own creative pursuits!

Each recipe has not only ingredients and methods listed but also a timeline. Baking requires a lot of planning ahead, and all of these recipes span at least two days, some of them more. But don’t worry, it’s not all active time! Most of it is waiting for fermentation or resting the dough. Make sure you pay attention to the timeline before beginning so you don’t get jammed up.

Most importantly, do not stress over things being perfect! Working in a home environment is going to result in pastries with personality, so embrace each bake’s certain je ne sais quoi. That’s part of the fun of it: picking up on all the nuances of your ingredients, your technique, and your environment. If something happens to go undeniably wrong, there is a section at the end for troubleshooting.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Pastry Temple
“Pastry Temple is more than a collection of recipes; it’s a masterclass in the fundamentals of pastry. Christina Wood guides you through the building blocks of brioche, puff pastry, croissants, and more. With clear instructions, helpful timelines, and a focus on technique, Wood empowers you to transform your kitchen into your very own pastry temple.”
—J. Kenji López-Alt, New York Times-bestselling author of The Food Lab

“A reverent and meticulous guide from one of the most talented pastry minds working today. This book provides the foundational knowledge and technical precision needed to create truly exceptional baked goods. Wood’s insights and recipes will elevate your work and deepen your understanding of pastry as an art form.”
—Francisco Migoya, head of pastry at Noma and co-author of Modernist Bread

“A love letter to the art of pastry, rooted in technique and bursting with creativity. This is not just a cookbook, but an invitation to build your own pastry altar.”
—Shota Nakajima, restaurateur and Top Chef alum

“Christina invites you into a space where each dough, each fold, is a step toward something deeper—a quiet devotion to the craft and the joy of creating something truly beautiful.”
—Aran Goyoaga, James Beard–recognized author of Cannelle et Vanille

“Christina, bold and brave, tells her story clearly through textures, layers, and flavors.
This passion project will be appreciated by amateurs and professionals alike.”
—Ewald Notter, World Pastry champion, author, and chef

From the Publisher