National Donut Day is June 5, and I want to tell you about the most important hole in the history of pastry.

In 1847, a sixteen-year-old sailor named Hanson Gregory got frustrated that the center of his fried dough cakes never cooked through. So he punched out the middle with the top of a tin pepper shaker. The hole he created, the part nobody eats, turned out to be the thing that made the donut iconic. Its most recognizable feature is an absence. (I’ve spent considerable time deciding whether that’s a baking fact or a philosophy, and I’m going with philosophy.)

Because here’s the thing about the hole in the donut: it’s not a mistake. It’s the shape that made everything else work.

Romance novels run on the same principle. Every great love story has a wound at its center. Not a flaw but a shape. Something the heroine has built her whole life around because she stopped believing it could ever be filled. The woman who learned that trusting people was expensive. The man who confused control with safety for so long he forgot there was a difference. They carry these absences around like they’re just who they are, not realizing they’ve been the exact outline of someone they haven’t met yet.

The love interest doesn’t fix the wound. (Romance writers who know what they’re doing know better than that.) They just stand next to it and refuse to look away. Which is, if you think about it, the harder thing.

This is why food romance works on me the way it does. (That and food is basically how I process all of my emotions, which is something I’ve made peace with.) A kitchen is where people make something out of nothing and call it care. That’s the same engine.

If you want a series built exactly on that, recipes, found family, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you through a shared meal, start with A Taste of Temptation, the first in my Recipes for Love series. Seven books. All the feelings. Possibly some actual baking inspiration.