Let them eat cake

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, interviews Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush, the editors of Cake Zine.

Cake is an easy dessert to love. It is decadent in both flavor and metaphor. Let them eat cake. It was a piece of cake. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. She’s as nutty as a fruitcake! There are layers to cake—a seemingly endless repertoire of cultural references, recipes, and cake-oriented literature with a history as rich as its taste. When I think of cake and pop culture, I’m reminded of a scene from That 70s Show, where Eric helplessly declares, “I love cake!” in lieu of confessing to Donna his feelings.

Cake can stand for a lot of things: sex, ass, money, ease. Cake Zine, a biannual print publication created by Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush, gives cake the literary treatment, publishing essays, illustrations, reported features, and creative writing related to the theme at hand. (Loyal Dirt readers might recall that I’ve previously linked to Cake Zine’s interview with Rosemary Grant, who runs the Instagram page @ghostly.archive, featuring recipes engraved on tombstones.)

Abarbanel is a New York-based writer and editor, while Bush is a baker, who is at work on a narrative cookbook. Both have backgrounds in food media and first met through Instagram, collaborating on an end-of-year bake sale in 2021 before launching the magazine’s first issue, Sexy Cake, the following year. Cake Zine is set to release its third issue, Humble Pie, this summer. It’s a digression from cake, although pie is still squarely within dessert territory. Cake, after all, seems to be undergoing a physical metamorphosis on social media, so who’s to say what is cake and what isn’t? Certainly not Cake Zine.

Below is our conversation, which has been edited for clarity. You can preorder the third issue here.

Terry Nguyen: Cake Zine’s tagline is “a publication exploring society through sweets.” It’s true: Cake is so rife with metaphor! In regards to your respective backgrounds in food writing, what publications (or books or writers) inspired this project, from its subject material to editorial approach?

Cake Zine: Honestly, we built the plane as we flew it. We didn't spend years or even months developing the concept. We thought it would be fun to make an interdisciplinary magazine blending food and literature, emerging in part out of our fatigue with mainstream food media, where it feels like all the brands are blending together in theme and scope.

We admire the wacky eccentricity of early Lucky Peach and the single ingredient approach of the Short Stack cookbook series and Isolarii, two small publishing projects with distinct and thoughtful formats. We love how Vittles gives writers of different backgrounds space and appropriate historical context to explore niche food topics, how TASTE (where Aliza is a contributing editor) foregrounds historical context in modern conversations, and how the food organization Tables of Contents (where Tanya is on staff) brings literature alive through cooking.

TN: Cake Zine has a website and a newsletter with select interviews and updates, but the publication is distributed in print. What’s the thinking behind having an entirely print product without a digital aside?

CZ: Maybe we’re romantics at heart. There’s something special about sitting down with an actual physical magazine. Right now we only publish two issues a year, and since there’s a huge amount of work that goes into each issue, we wanted to use that time (and money) to make a beautiful physical object that signals a high degree of care.

Our designer and art director Noah Emrich spends a lot of time thinking about how the magazine feels in your hands. Even our text color isn’t black—it’s a rich, lush shade of chocolate brown that comes from the cover of our first issue, Sexy Cake. Hopefully, it’s a cue that this isn’t the kind of content you skim while also scrolling through TikTok or watching Netflix.

We’re a literary magazine and don’t cover hyper timely stories—no “best restaurant lists” or breaking news—so there isn’t an urgent need to post our content online, and right now we don’t have the resources to build a website that we think offers a comparative experience to the physical product. We hope that selectively sharing content from the issue in our newsletter alongside interviews with folks in the baking world piques enough audience interest that people are compelled to buy a copy for the full experience.

TN: Given how you’ve both worked in food media, was there any pressure with self-publishing a project? Did it ever feel like you had too much control?

CZ: Honestly, self-publishing is extremely liberating. We don’t have the traditional constraints of media institutions—no advertisers or execs in suits telling us that our content is too niche or inappropriate. We literally published erotica in the first issue (as was thematic for Sexy Cake). All of our profits go into funding the next issue so we aren’t in this for money—it’s because we are excited by the project and our collaborators. We can make weirder choices and publish unexpected formats that typically aren’t found in mainstream food publications like fiction, poetry, and artists statements.

There were certainly moments, like paying sales tax or figuring out distribution, where we were learning how to execute aspects of running a magazine that typically fall outside of editorial control. But it’s outweighed by the joy of making something for pleasure, and we’re lucky to work with incredibly talented collaborators who feel similarly, like our designer Noah Emrich and an entire contributing editorial team who help us execute each issue.

TN: There are so many avenues to consume food media, broadly speaking, from TikTok and Instagram to all the wonderful recipe-oriented Substacks and YouTube channels. How do you stay in the loop with all that’s going on in the NYC food scene and online?

CZ: Of course Instagram is a big part of how we stay in the loop—our Explore page is entirely cakes at this point, and it’s the best way to find out about pop-ups going on, but most of the collaborations we do are rooted in real life experiences. A cake can look beautiful online, but you can only tell how good it is in person.

Mostly, it helps that we both work in food beyond the magazine and had significant professional networks within the NYC food scene before launching it. Tanya is a writer and the pastry chef at Little Egg and has done a number of pop-ups across the city collaborating with and in conversation with other bakers. Aliza is a freelance writer, former editor at Bon Appetit, and contributing editor at TASTE. We’re always going to events together—whether we find out about them through Instagram, friends in our professional network, or Eater NY’s pop-up column—and collaborations arise naturally from there.

TN: Lately, I’ve been returning to this notion from the poet Charles Olson that publications, print or digital, are created to capture a specific moment in the zeitgeist. Magazines are micro-societies, an “attempt to formally recreate the spontaneity of social relations on the page.” Would you consider Cake Zine a micro-society? I’ve been told the launch parties have been fun. And what aspect of the food media or zeitgeist are you trying to respond to?

CZ: We absolutely think of Cake Zine as reflecting and nurturing a “micro-society” or “micro-scene” that was already growing in New York City. On the one hand, so many chefs and bakers created independent pop-ups and bake sales during the pandemic. We saw an increased interest in cake online as bakers like Yip Studio and Aimee France (YungKombucha420) racked up followings, and we wanted to use this growing appetite for pastry as a launchpad into bigger conversations around the significance of food in society, specifically in an interdisciplinary format that blends aspects of traditional food and literature magazines with more subversive cultural content.

At the same time, we think interdisciplinary exploration is the way of the future and Cake Zine emerges out of this ethos. There’s been a huge shift in the way people self-identify as “food people” over the past decade. Instead of just targeting “foodies” who have a narrow focus on eating at the best restaurants or fermenting their own kombucha, Cake Zine is for people who view food as an interesting element of culture alongside music, fashion, film, etc. We embrace a variety of perspectives, whether you’re a pastry chef or a poet.

Because we are a part of this ecosystem already, we want to continue to nurture it with immersive, admittedly hedonistic events that bring the magazine to life. We had custom cake tattoos at our first party for Sexy Cake because the artist Anna Williams contributed an illustration for the issue and happened to be guesting in the city, and it’s since become a signature of our parties (and popularized across the city too). We have independent bakers serve their own thematic cakes directly to guests at the party—it’s a bit of a feeding frenzy—because we want people to know that these cakes aren’t just made by disembodied hands online. We book great DJs and sell cool merch, but we think the real reason why our events resonate is because the only thing we’re selling our audience is the strange, special mag we spent the past six months making for free. Luckily, it turns out that’s something people want to celebrate.

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