Under His Touch by Jeffe Kennedy is a May-December boss-subordinate office romance, a setup that is complete catnip for me that nevertheless has epic potential to go really far wrong. I love huge age gaps in my romance (my husband and I are ten years apart) and I love the realism of office romances. But often neither of these storylines work so well. In any office romance, especially a boss-subordinate romance, and even more so with an age difference, there’s a fine line to walk between hella hot and hella creeptastic. Kennedy manages to walk the line with room to spare, creating a delightful story of a precocious, ambitious young woman and her older, more experienced lover that worked for me on every level.

Amber Dolors is a bright, ambitious young woman who knows just what she wants, but not how to get it. Not quite yet anyway. She’s had no trouble attracting harmless young men, but what she wants is a relationship that’s quite different from that. Amber has developed an interest in BDSM and is eager to explore it with someone attractive, experienced and willing to teach. Her nascent kinkdar tells her that her boss, Alec Knight, might be her ticket into the world of dominance and submission. Maybe her only ticket since her local NYC kink scene is portrayed as being difficult for a youngster such as herself to break into.

Alec Knight is Amber’s boss, many rungs above her in the corporate hierarchy. This presents a huge problem for him because not only is he in fact a dominant with a ex-wife in his past whose kinky standards he couldn’t live up to, he’s also a really good guy. He’s painfully aware of the fact that getting involved with Amber could ruin his career, but mostly that it would open her up to accusations of having slept her way to the top, which is horrifically unfair because she’s super bright and fully capable of getting there all on her own. After much resisting though, he finally gives into her pleas to teach her the, ahem, ropes.

One little fun thing for me was that Amber is also just a little bit geeky. She makes all these references to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series, which is the series that got me into comics and which hasn’t ever been replaced in my affections. Seeing the myriad Sandman references just tickled me silly and probably significantly influenced my affection for this book. But they’re not just Easter eggs for Sandman fans. Amber tries to share the series with Alec, who is fairly dismissive of them. It’s a problem that isn’t unique to May-December romances, but a lot of the time such issues signal death in them. Despite the relative youth of one partner, there still needs to be mutual respect and Alex spends much of the novel struggling with the fact that Amber is just so young.

Together the two of them eventually stumble their way through the minefields of all their various power dynamics (including the boss-subordinate one) in a way that felt believable to me, even given current human resource realities. It’s mainly Alec’s reticence to ruin Amber’s career and her insistence on a sexual relationship that made this work for me. Alec really has a rough time trying to decide the best course of action. He veers a bit into over-protectiveness, which Amber neither needs or wants and which she makes very clear. I think it would be easy to say, “Nope, no way, always wrong” when confronted with a scenario like this. But I remember being a young woman eager to make my own decisions (even if they turned out to be wrong ones, against the wisdom of my friends and family) and sometimes big gambles pay off. It’s part of growing up. And definitely makes Under His Touch one for my keeper shelf.

Jeffe Kennedy is a writer who keeps her characters very well fed. It’s an aspect of her work that I very much appreciate. Her smoking hot erotic romance Ruby really belongs on every foodie romance lover’s keeper shelf. The hero is a chef and, well, I reviewed it here so you can just go look at that if you’re interested. Her latest effort is no exception. Even when her characters order in, they do it in style. When the hero and heroine get delivery, cannoli, an Italian filled pastry, is on the menu.

I made several batches of cannoli while testing out what might work best. At first, I thought I wanted the most traditional cannoli possible as Italian restaurants in New York City do not mess around. But sometimes what’s possible in a restaurant isn’t possible for the home baker. I suspect Italian pastry chefs likely roll this very stiff dough through a pasta machine. Just guessing since following a very traditional recipe, I was presented with a cannoli dough that was far too stiff to roll as thin as I’d have liked (and I have a MONSTER of a solid maple rolling pin). But adaptation is the name of the game.

I had made several pie crusts recently and the current trend in getting flaky, tender crusts is to use vodka in place of some of the water. The alcohol inhibits gluten formation. And well, this is basically pie crust dough. The proportions are almost the same. So I decided that rather than go completely toward the traditional Marsala, I’d replace some with vodka for a higher alcohol content. And OMIGOSH. Did that ever make a huge difference. They look like cannoli shells, they taste like cannoli shells, they get all blistered and crispy like cannoli shells. Teensy tiny little change, big damn result. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring that out.

Anyway, once I’d added vodka, there was no looking back. Ricotta filling is a pretty traditional choice for cannoli and I did like this one just fine. I cut this filling recipe in half in case you want to do more than one filling. I also happened to have made a milk chocolate chantilly for a recipe over Christmas and thought it might be excellent as cannoli filling. Spoiler: it was. And I used the same technique to make a Nutella version. Make these two whipped ganache fillings a day ahead as they need to rest in the fridge overnight. You can double the recipes with no problem if you only want to make one type of filling. Otherwise, these are sized to fill 12 shells each and the shell recipe makes 24 so just pick two.

I stored the pre-fried, unfilled shells for 48 hours before filling and they were fine. Filled ones didn’t last 4 hours in the fridge before they started to get a little soft and not as crispy. So it’s best if you can fill them as you need them. I know I say this twice a month, but these cannoli are the best
thing I’ve ever made for the blog. It’s one of those horrible projects that takes forever and requires dipping molded baked goods into vats of
boiling oil, but it’s sadly completely worth the effort. Also, because it’s a trifle complicated, I’ve included a dozen more photos of the process here.

I’m legendary among my friends for being able to resist my own baked goods, but I might have eaten a couple of these for breakfast. Okay, a few. And I maybe did it three days in a row. So there’s that.

[tasty-recipe id=”1831″] Disclosure: I am friends with the author and I received a complimentary copy of Under His Touch from NetGalley for review purposes.