Lia Holter’s new cookbook has 45 recipes in it, and two secret ingredients.

She is perhaps reluctantly willing to share one: she adds a touch of pumpkin pie spice to her zucchini bread.

When she was a girl, she loved the zucchini bread made by her mother’s best friend, Linda. Later, after she became a prize-winning baker, Holter could never quite re-create the flavor. Finally, she asked Linda for the answer, and now it tastes just right.

You’ll have to buy the book to learn Holter’s other secret ingredient. It’s in her recipe for pie crust — she says it both adds a depth of flavor and also makes it flaky.

Holter is the owner of Made. by Lia Craft Bakery in Florissant, Missouri. She first came to national attention in 2014, when she and another local baker won the “Next Great Baker” baking contest show on TLC.

To celebrate the victory, she baked all of the cupcakes served at her watch party at Hendel’s restaurant in Florissant, which is owned by her sister and brother-in-law.

A year later, she baked the wedding cake for her own wedding, along with an assortment of macarons, lemon meringue tarts, cupcakes and miniature cakes for a gathering of more than 400. But at least she had some help with the desserts that weren’t the wedding cake.

Holter opened her bakery five years ago, in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Among other pastries, she sells doughnuts — an act of courage, considering that Florissant is perhaps the best doughnut city in the world. Old Town Donuts was recently voted the best doughnut in the country, and Doughnut Cupboard and Donut Delight are also strong contenders.

But Holter’s are different. She only makes cake doughnuts (which she spells ‘donuts,’ to distinguish them from ‘doughnuts,’ which she uses to mean yeast doughnuts). And the ones she sells at the bakery are vegan and sometimes gluten-free.

The cookbook includes a number of similar recipes that are vegan or gluten-free or are sensitive to food allergies. She says you can’t tell the difference between them and baked goods made the traditional way.

“The demand for gluten-free or vegan or egg-free or nut-free — all of these allergy-friendly things is so much higher than I would have ever thought,” she says.

The bakery’s top seller, in fact, is its lemon blueberry scones, which are vegan. Last year, it sold more than 10,000 of them. The recipe is the first one in the cookbook.

Holter herself went through what she calls a “vegan phase,” and about 90% of the food she cooks at home is still vegan, she says. But a majority of the goodies she sells, and the recipes she has published, are made with butter, or cream, or butter and cream, plus sugar and sometimes chocolate.

“I feel like, if you’re going to a bakery, you’re not really trying to watch your calories,” she says.

Naturally, she includes a recipe for gooey butter cake, which she calls St. Louie Cake. Surprisingly, the recipe calls for using a cake mix for the base. She adds flour to it and other ingredients, but she says it is the only way to get the right flavor and texture.

It’s the only recipe in which she uses a mix, and she specifies that it be a white cake mix, not the more commonly used yellow. The butter flavor in a yellow cake mix comes across as fake, she says.

One of the book’s more unusual recipes is for gingerdoodles, which are a cross between ginger snaps and snickerdoodles. Made with ginger and molasses, they develop an entrancing crackle on top.

“It’s literally probably the best cookie ever. It has this perfect chew, but yet a little bit of crunch — and the spices and everything … I don’t know how to describe it, because it’s so good,” she says.

Holter is fit and trim, a condition she credits both to stress and the fact that she has three children, 11 months to 8 years old. In her book’s introduction, she also mentions “Francis, who watches over us from above.” Francis was a miscarriage, and Holter says she misses her and thinks about her every day.

“Losing a child has opened my eyes to so much. I think before that, I put too much emphasis on making social media posts and doing all these things for the business. I would lose the sense of what really is the most important, which is family. Family comes first in business and in life in general,” she says.

“And it sounds terrible to say it, but it took losing Francis to realize that.”

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