Oakland's Bake Sum bakery is getting a cookbook — and a new location in Alameda

Oakland, Calif. - When Joyce Tang left the tech world to open a bakery, she wasn't sure how the story would end. Six years later, it's being published.

Tang, the founder of Bake Sum in Oakland, has a cookbook coming out Sept. 1 from Hardie Grant Publishing, co-written with San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho. The book is available for pre-order now and will be carried at local bookstores.

"It's been many, many years in the making," Tang said. "We had a story to tell."

Bake Sum has built a devoted following in the East Bay with its "Asian Americana" approach to pastry — drawing on Pan-Asian culinary traditions and mashing them together into something entirely new. Readers of Nosh recently named it the best bakery in the East Bay. The New York Times went a step further, placing Bake Sum's signature krisubi on its list of the 25 best dishes in the country.

The Croissubi is Tang's take on the Hawaiian street snack spam musubi. Instead of rice, it uses croissant dough, layered with Spam, seaweed, Parmesan frico and a house-made togarashi, with unagi sauce inside.

But ask Tang what she reaches for when no one's looking, and her answer surprises.

"My personal favorite to eat is the traditional butter croissant," she said. "It takes three days to make. We bring the butter in from France. We put 27 layers of butter into each one." She described it as the black coffee of the pastry world — simple enough to reveal everything about the baker who made it.

The name Bake Sum is a nod to dim sum and to the idea of addition — the sum of many different parts and many different people. Tang said the collaborative, multicultural team is what gives the menu its range and strength. An earlier bakery, she admitted, bore a name so difficult to pCrronounce and spell that it became a lesson in branding.

The business is growing. Bake Sum recently opened a second location in Alameda, where lines have been running roughly an hour long. The original Oakland shop is open six days a week.

Looking ahead a decade, Tang said she hopes for a few more locations, maybe a second or third book, and continued growth — though not too fast. "Growth can be a little painful sometimes," she said.

The cookbook, she added, carries a theme bigger than recipes. Tang's father swam from China to Macau. Her mother took a boat from China to Hong Kong. Those leaps made her own possible.

"I just want to encourage more folks to take more leaps," she said.