There's love and there's CakeLove, and Warren Brown has been lucky enough to find both.

It would be oh-so-precious to say the lawyer turned baker, entrepreneur and Food Network host (Sugar Rush) will be baking the cake for his October wedding. He won't, but bakers from his growing empire of bakeries will.

''There will be six different cakes,'' says Brown, 37. ''Carrot cake, German chocolate, peanut butter and chocolate, maybe strawberries and cream.'' As of last week, he was undecided about the sixth.

There are dozens from which to choose, many of them featured in Brown's first cookbook, CakeLove: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $27.50). It's the beautifully photographed, meticulously researched result of all that he has learned about baking tender, richly flavored layer cakes, moist Bundt cakes, light-as-air foam cakes, almost all of them slathered with billowing buttercream, deep-chocolate ganache or glossy glazes.

Then there are the cakes that Grandma likely never thought of: tres leches butter cake, orange-mango-cayenne pound cake, mojito pound cake, coffee-accented Da Mocha!

He likes ''lots of different flavors and developing and pulling out those flavors,'' Brown said in a telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., home base. ``I like to play with the different ingredients and see how they work together.''

Going from ''torts to tortes'' is the stuff of press releases, but it pretty much tells his story. Born in San Antonio and reared in Cleveland, he attended Brown University, taught for a few years, went to law school and worked from 1998 to 2000 in the office of the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

He had loved to cook from an early age, but pulling off a successful scratch cake eluded him. In 1999, he made a New Year's resolution to master the skill -- obviously followed through in a big way. There are six CakeLove bakeries in the Washington, D.C., area -- sweet success, you might say.

''This is the best experience I've had in my life,'' Brown says.

Nancy Ancrum writes about the culinary legacy of the African diaspora.

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