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‘Sweet’ romances: Digesting the trend of combining sweet treats with love stories

‘Sweet’ romances: Digesting the trend of combining sweet treats with love stories

‘Sweet’ romances: Digesting the trend of combining sweet treats with love stories

Chocolatier-created caramels and truffles and pralines and mousses that melt on the tongue and instantly release that ‘just fell in love’ hormone. Cupcakes topped with pink vanilla frosting and edible glitter made to share (icing endearingly smeared on a lover’s nose optional). Bakery window displays crammed with a mouth-watering array of cakes and cookies and biscuits and gateaux…

These are the backdrops and essential ingredients for many a romance novel today. They call it a ‘foodie’ romance: a love story that incorporates cooking or baking or dining, usually of the sweet variety: chocolate or cakes.

Did the trend begin with Joanna Harris’s bestselling romance novel Chocolat? Perhaps. As far back as one can trace, food and romance have gone hand in hand, but in recent years a veritable genre has emerged in romance writing to encompass sweet nothings fused with sweet somethings. Take Jenny Colgan, for example, who has woven sweet foods as a theme into several novels now (see my recent review of her The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris), and this week I am reviewing another book in the subgenre: Baking Love by Lauren Boyd.

In a sense, the subgenre looks to strengthen the proposition of books to readers by combining two favourite elements. So the original romance formula is:

Romance story = happy romantic reader

But the revised formula is:

Romance story + sweets = happy romantic, sweet-toothed reader

And it’s a successful formula, as Jenny Colgan’s success proves – she’s a bestselling author and has just won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s highest accolade, the Romantic Novel of the Year, for her novel Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams.

The idea, of course, is that a romantic reader is also a reader who enjoys creating and sharing and consuming sweet foods. It’s an assumption, perhaps, but a well-founded one. Women are nurturers, and we often nurture through food. And all people (but women especially) are programmed to enjoy sweet foods. For example, scientific studies have proven that chocolate contains serotonin, the ‘happy hormone’. What else boosts this hormone in the body? Well, kissing is one of the cited activities!

But in addition to the physical side of consuming sweets, and how sugar and chocolate create an emotional response that heightens romance, I think another factor is at play in the development of the foodie romance subgenre: career. Cupcakes, for example, have become increasingly popular in recent years, which has led to many women setting up their own cupcake businesses. Whether a small operation run from home alongside bringing up the kids, or a cake-based enterprise that aspires to have outlets and cafes and cookbooks (think Hummingbird Bakery), the world of sweets has become a domain in which women test and then spread their wings to find a creative, independent, fulfilling career. And of course, we fellow women celebrate that!

The foodie romance, then, is here to stay, I think. Its main limitation? Readers may decide they don’t want to read a book from the subgenre too often, because of the appetites it awakens! Why, this week reading a foodie romance inspired me to dust off my favourite chocolate cake recipe (which I will share next on this blog) – delicious indeed, but a treat to indulge in only occasionally.

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