You might want to check out BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking by Shirley O. Corriher - the author is often featured on Alton Brown's Good Eats.
The BakeWise book is excellent for the listing of principles - the ratios that work for higher-fat/sugar cakes, and so on. The recipes tend to be very sweet, and very wet - i.e. Southern U.S. desserts.
However, the book is poorly edited. Visually messy, with typos, repeated text, and odd text highlight passages that are right next to the exact words shown. It almost appears to be unfinished. There's lots of attention to the sweet cakes, but the bread section appears to be practically ghostwritten, with a lot of copy/pasted text.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a more scientific discussion of sweet desserts in book form. If you're looking to get better at straightforward bread production - Jeffery Hamelman's "Bread" is excellent, and goes very well into the science of the work.
However, the book is poorly edited. Visually messy, with typos, repeated text, and odd text highlight passages that are right next to the exact words shown. It almost appears to be unfinished. There's lots of attention to the sweet cakes, but the bread section appears to be practically ghostwritten, with a lot of copy/pasted text.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a more scientific discussion of sweet desserts in book form. If you're looking to get better at straightforward bread production - Jeffery Hamelman's "Bread" is excellent, and goes very well into the science of the work.