 I've never done a cookbook reading, I've never been to a reading, I'm used to doing cooking demos while I talk about food stuff and so, and I also think that I have a really monotone voice, so I'm a little stressed about that, but no, I'm good at ad-living though so we'll see what happens, have you ever, have you ever seen my book, everybody have a copy already, you're going to, you're going to get one after this, this is not the actual cover, there's a nice picture of me on it but I pulled out the kitchen one out of Citizen Cake so I could read from it and look at how many stains are already on the pages. The most exciting thing though I have to tell you about my book and I wish I had a little slideshow for you, but I have a character that I came up with and her name is Karimi Keiki and she shows up all over the pages as like my alter ego and she makes big sculptural things out of dessert components so if you haven't seen that you need to check that out because that's never been done in a cookbook before. So I'll start with what I like about this book a lot. Demolition desserts would not have happened without the works and inspirations from Avery Faulkner, Jason Faulkner, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, The Cure, Pierre Hermé, David Lynch, Martha Stewart, Madonna, Richard Cera, Jean Paul Gautier, David Bowie, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Gary, Marie Antoine Karem, Jane Campion, Sophia Coppola, Christine Manfield, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella Franz Klein, Masaharu Morimoto, Diff Juice, Cachtoe Twins, The Adria Brothers at El Bowie, Yoshitomo Nara, and Comde Garcione, Chrome Hearts and Orson Welles. I don't need to say anything else. Dessert for me is an art form. My usual approach is to take a classic like apple pie, carrot cake, tiramisu, and rethink it. The initial image that comes to mind is wonderful and comforting but then I always ask myself the same question, how can I turn this dessert upside down and come up with a new way to look at it and eat it? Other times I will create a dessert that is entirely new, sometimes building it around one extraordinary ingredient or an unfamiliar flavor combination. I'm inspired by all kinds of things from exotic sugars to architecture to song lyrics, and I think of desserts as whimsical, fun, stunning, exciting, and of course delicious. My dad exposed me to the works of the modernist such as Rothko, Stella, Steele, Klein, Liechtenstein, and Calder, and Demoncorn at an early age, and then there was Julia Child. My mother and I would watch her shows together and I especially loved how Julia took her cooking seriously but kept her sense of humor. If you combine the works of the modernist with Julia Child and the influences from every American kid growing up in the 70s, the Beatles, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Snickers Bars, and the television show Zoom, you get an idea of how the creative part of my brain works. Let's see. Growing up in Southern California, I imagined myself directing movies someday. When I began to focus on experimental filmmaking, I moved to the Bay Area to attend the San Francisco Art Institute and I produced installations and films built around audience participation, including a film I made called Black Espresso, Black Sorbet, a film scene, dessert experience that I created for the audience. It was a great film. It was all very visual. It was all about baristas and their movement, and then a lot of just moving jazzy kind of imagery with, and I made everybody wake up by having espresso before the film because experimental film can be kind of tedious for people to watch, but espresso before the film and then chocolate covered sorbet bonbons afterwards. And to me, people go, how did you go from film to being a chef? And I'm like, well, I was already kind of doing it, even my filmmaking. While still in school, I worked at part time at the original Williamson Elma store on Sutter Street in San Francisco. My co-workers and I would skim through all the new cookbooks when they came in. Julia Child, Marion Cunningham, and James McNair all came into our store. It was a totally different celebrity scene than in what I was used to, but I was into it. I was dining in some of the hottest restaurants of the time, Stars, Sheppanese, Zuni, Monsoon, Rosalie's, and Eddie Jacks. And before long, I was leaning towards cooking as a profession. Skip fast forward a little bit. The early 1990s was an exciting time to work in restaurants in the Bay area. While California cuisine was taking hold of the rest of the country, chefs in San Francisco were looking abroad for inspiration, incorporating ingredients and techniques from foreign cuisines into their cooking. Okay. In 1997, I opened the original Citizen Cake with my pastry chef, Sarah Koh, who had been working with me at Rubicon. The original Citizen Cake location was an obscure corner in San Francisco's South Market neighborhood. And two years into it, I was feeling our location was too small and too remote. So we moved to Grove Street in Hayes Valley near City Hall, where we are today. I love thinking about the architecture of cakes and the simplicity of shortbread cookies, but plated desserts are my favorite expression of pastry because they give me the freedom to juxtapose components with different textures and temperatures. Okay, this one's called Battleship Potemkin. This is it. Inspiration comes from many sources, fiction, fiction and nonfiction, people, places, songs, and lyrics, films and architecture. In 1992, when I became the pastry chef at Elka at the Miyako Hotel, this was the first dessert that I presented to my weight staff. This is my first pastry chef job. I told them that it was inspired by a scene in the Battleship Potemkin 1925 silent film by Eisenstein that forever changed cinematography and film editing. I explained that the story takes place during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and that depicts the crew of the Battleship Potemkin rising up against their cruel officers. I described the heart-wrenching scene of the Odessa steps in which scores of civilians are slaughtered. I showed them how I made small Odessa steps out of chocolate shortbread with raspberry sauce covered raspberries representing the blood shed of the victims. When I was done talking, I'll set seven of them stood there staring at me. Another of them said a word and I could tell what they were thinking. What planet did she come from? Finally, one of them asked, do you want us to say that to our customers about the blood shed on the Odessa steps? Yes, I told them I do. Story matters.