Aliza Abarbanel & Tanya Bush Transcript
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Hi, everyone. You're listening to The Future Of Food Is You, a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Abena Anim-Somuah, and each week, I talk to emerging talents in the food world, and they share what they're up to as well as their dreams and predictions for what's ahead. As for me, I'm the founder of The Eden Place, a community that's all about gathering people intentionally around food. I love this new generation of chefs, bakers, and creatives making their way in the worlds of food, drink, media, and tech.
Today's guests are Aliza Abarbanel and Tanya Bush, co-founders of Cake Zine, a literary magazine that explores the intersections of culture and food. Aliza, Tanya, and I talked about their origins of their partnership. It all started with a DM, the ins and outs of producing an indie mag, and working collaboratively with their community. Aliza and Tanya also give us a sneak peek into their next issue, Tough Cookie, coming soon.
Thank you to Kerrygold for supporting The Future Of Food Is You. Kerrygold is the iconic Irish brand, famous for its rich butter and cheese made in Ireland with milk from grass-fed cows. I was recently in Ireland with Kerrygold and got to meet some of the people behind their signature butter and cheese. I spent an afternoon with Kerrygold's cheese tasters to learn how classic cheddars like Dubliner and Skellig are aged. I visited the Ballymaloe Cookery School and watched Rachel Allen make some champ, which is basically an Irish take on mashed potatoes filled with scallions and Kerrygold salted butter. In the gold foil, of course. We also spent an afternoon with the Grubb-Furno family, the cheese makers behind the Kerrygold Cashel Blue farmhouse cheese, perfect for any cheeseboard or salad topping. It was wonderful just to see how Kerrygold is such a big part of Irish culinary culture. We even got to meet the famous cows. The Cleary family, in County Waterford, introduced us to their herd and I learned so much about what goes into producing the best milk for Kerrygold's butter and cheese. Be on the lookout for some cow selfies on my Instagram. Each time I reach for my favorite unsalted butter or yummy cheddar, I'll be thinking of those cows and their dreamy pasture. Look for Kerrygold butter and cheese at your favorite supermarket, specialty grocery store or cheese shop, and visit kerrygoldusa.com for recipes and product information.
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Now, let's check in with today's guests. Aliza, Tanya, thank you both so much for joining us on The Future Of Food Is You podcast.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Thank you for having us.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, we're excited.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Can you tell us where you grew up, and how did food show up in your life? Tanya, we'll start with you.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. Neither of my parents were really big cooks. It was a lot of fish sticks, frozen samosas, that vibe. But I did grow up working at an artisanal ice cream shop, which was the impetus for my interest in pastry. It was a locally oriented, sustainable ice cream shop. It's still around, it's called The Bent Spoon. And there, we participated in the ice cream making itself, so we were making lavender Mascarpone and rosemary ice cream and blueberry corn, and it was a really cool formative beginning to my food consciousness.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I've been dying to go eat at this ice cream place and I still haven't been, so every time Tanya says the flavors, I just get hungry.
I grew up in Los Angeles, California, in a big Jewish family and community, so I think a lot of my early experiences with food were tied to two Jewish things, which is, food as a cultural artifact, and then, also, just planning your meals very far in advance. My family loves to cook and eat, and I think that my awareness of food in a professional sphere came to be when I started reading Jonathan Gold's food writing in LA Weekly. My family was a family that would all get in the car and then go drive to some strip mall somewhere in LA because a new Jonathan Gold review had just dropped and we wanted to eat it, so I think I kind of learned the value of participating in food as a way to connect to a city and the way that you exist in it as well.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Well, Tanya, you're also a pastry chef at Little Egg, in Brooklyn. When did you start to feel like you had a real connection to pastry and you could start working in pastry professionally?
Tanya Bush:
I worked in restaurants in a variety of different capacities for a while, but when the pandemic hit, I was working for Tables Of Contents, which is an organization that makes dinners inspired by literature, founded by Evan, who's actually the chef at Little Egg now.
I started baking with him a little bit and loving it and decided I wanted a more technical understanding of the form. And I hadn't gone to pastry school. I studied history in undergrad and had ambitions to maybe do a PhD or write. Nothing really in the food space. When the pandemic hit, I started experimenting a little bit more seriously on my own and then decided to take a pastry cook job at a local Brooklyn restaurant, and that was just very much to try and understand what it meant to do it on a larger scale. And from there, I have staged Street a few different places and had a strange experience cooking in Italy, and now, I run the pastry program at Little Egg and continue to do pastries at Tables Of Contents, which is a really fun way to combine my interest in books and food.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
And you're also working on your first book, Will This Make You Happy?, which is alluding to your Instagram handle, @will.this.make.me.happy, and congratulations. I know that comes out in 2025. What stage are you in the process, and what made you want to write a cookbook?
Tanya Bush:
I'm in the drafting process. I define it as a literary cookbook, because I think that it's much heavier on narrative than, I think, most traditional cookbooks are. It's a coming of age story that's taking the infrastructure of a recipe, and then using that to tell this larger narrative that takes place over the course of a year. And it's about warring with long-term partnership and trying to make meaning as a young adult and embarking on a baking journey and trying to gain a very technical skill.
I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm also terrified by the project because it is entirely formally ambitious, which is the ethos of Cake Zine, in a lot of ways, is that we're interested in the interdisciplinary and I've never been interested in writing a straightforward cookbook. It was always something that was in this hybrid, genre-breaking space, and I was really lucky to find an agent and an editor who believed in that, and I'm working with Forsyth Harmon, who is an amazing illustrator and author herself. She's wrote this amazing graphic novel called Justine, and illustrated a book with Catherine Lacey. She's an amazing collaborator. Some days, I'm like, "I'm so lucky to have this project," and other days, I'm terrified, feeling like I'm hurdling into the abyss and that it's all going to be for naught.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Aliza, you have incredible bio lines in some of the biggest publications. You've written for the New York Times. When did you start to develop your relationship to food, particularly through food writing?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Well, it's interesting because I was a music writer before I wrote about anything else. Well, before I did anything, I was on my high school newspaper where I just was doing my best.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah, it's a good starting point.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
What was your high school newspaper called?
Aliza Abarbanel:
It was called The Globe and Gale, which is a pun on the Globe Mail, which is a Canadian newspaper.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah. Mine was called the Samo High, which was the name of the school that we went to, so no puns to be found.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I always loved reading and writing, and I think I found out that you can get a lot of access and ask a lot of questions if you're writing a story about something. That was my way in, is that I was especially interested in cultural writing and writing that uses culture as a way to extract out into what it means to be a human, or to have pleasure. And when I was in college, I went to journalism school. I did all kinds of different cultural writing. My first internship was at Noisy, at Vice, which was a music publication, and I started to realize that music is really personal to me, and also that I didn't feel I had the institutional knowledge of being able to name all of the bands and all of the references. It also is a very male dominated space, still is, but especially in 2013, when I was starting out.
And then, I just started writing about food at some of the internships I was doing and realized that food just touches on so many things. It can be about labor or the environment or art or culture, and that I just loved all of those things, and I also just loved to cook and love to eat. I was always that person that people would ask, "Oh, I'm visiting, where should I go?"
And then I got my first job out of college at Bon Appétît, but specifically for Healthyish, which was a lifestyle vertical that they had for a couple years. It was an interesting backdoor into the food world because it wasn't just a food job. I was writing about ceramics or natural wine or houseplants in restaurants. I worked there for three and a half years and became an editor for the website and for the magazine. And I think, over that period of time, just living in New York and being a part of the food industry, I just fell in love with everybody that works in food and, especially professionally, decided that would be my focus.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
You're also a podcast host on This Is Taste, and are a contributing writer for Taste as well. You mentioned earlier that you use stories to get questions answered. How does that translate over to the podcast? How do you think about podcasting as a medium for you to explore food?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Oh, yeah. I think it's pretty selfish, honestly because I just think about who I want to talk to and ask questions to in the hopes that other people will be interested as well. And I think that I'm new to podcasting. I started as a contributing editor for Taste last year, and over time, Matt, who is the other co-host of This Is Taste, invited me on to the podcast. I was new to podcasting, but I've done interviewing as the core of my work for many years now. I very rarely write a story without any quotes in it. I mostly do interviews, and then, let that guide the story and go from there. I think that, even though I was new to podcasting, I had a hunch of how to talk to people, how to make a good story. I also, like you, like to talk to strangers at parties probably.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yes.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I think there's certain traits. When it comes to guests on the show, sometimes, it's people that I already know who I just know can tell a great story or are a good talker. Sometimes, it's people that I just want to ask more about.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everybody. I'm Kerry Diamond, the founder of Cherry Bombe and the editor in chief of Cherry Bombe Magazine. If you are looking for the newest issue of Cherry Bombe, be sure to visit one of our amazing stockists. Cherry Bombe is carried by great bookstores, cafes, magazine shops, and culinary boutiques across the country and abroad, places like Stella's Fine Market in Beacon, New York, Matriarch in Newport, Rhode Island, and Good Egg in Toronto. Visit Cherry Bombe.com for stockists near you.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Obviously, we've gathered here today to talk about Cake Zine. What was the first interaction you guys had together, and how did that spark the friendship that then led to the partnership that is Cake Zine? I'm excited for this story.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, it's very millennial. I slid into Aliza's DMs and we became friends.
Aliza Abarbanel:
She said, "Hey, I just did a popup and I have a lot of extra cookies, and I think I live in your neighborhood. Do you want to meet up for coffee?" And her photo on Instagram is not of herself. And her name, she had no name, so I had no idea who I was about to go meet, but I don't know. I said, "Sure." And we met up and talked for seven hours, probably?
Tanya Bush:
Yeah.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Wow. A true friend hang.
Tanya Bush:
It was love at first sight, yeah.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
That's amazing.
Tanya Bush:
It's so true. Yeah. And then, we ran a mutual aid bake sale together at Kit, which is actually, now, the Little Egg space, but it was benefiting food insecurity in the city around the holidays in 2021?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah. The two mutual aids were EV Loves NYC and Breaking Bread NYC and Tanya. And Tanya and I became friends and we realized that we had a lot of overlap in our own lives, but also professionally, and that we could pull together a great lineup of bakers to be making this bake sale. That was our first project. And then, while we were, I think, in a cab going over the Williamsburg Bridge with hundreds of pastry boxes that we were going to go assemble, Tanya started pitching me. She said, "Hey, what if we did a magazine all about cake?"
Tanya Bush:
I did indeed. And I think this was coming out of a disenchantment with, or fatigue with the general food media landscape at the time. And it was mid pandemic where we were all spending a lot of time on our screens and ogling these opulent cakes, and it felt like cake was so ripe for the taking and such an interesting forum for exploring history and culture and art. So I said, "What do you think about this little zine?" And Aliza was excited.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, I do think I was misled, in hindsight.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah?
Aliza Abarbanel:
I really pictured we were going to be photocopying pages in a Kinko's. That's what I thought we were going to do. I was planning on leaving my job at Bon Appétît, so I was going to be a freelance and I knew I was going to have time. Also, I was severely burnt out and I wanted to make something that was not something that I would've had the opportunity to do working at a big company like Condé Nast. And Tanya was telling me all these interesting historical tidbits about cake, cake as a vehicle for poisoning in the Victorian era. And I studied history also, so I just was geeking out on that. So I said yes, and then, we came up with the idea of doing twin issues. One of our commonalities is that Tanya and I both have twin sisters.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
So cool.
Tanya Bush:
We do.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Crazy. You're both twins?
Tanya Bush:
Yes.
Aliza Abarbanel:
One of many ...
Abena Anim-Somuah:
What?
Tanya Bush:
But not to each other.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Which is always confusing to people. We're both Scorpios, we're both Jewish, we're both queer, we're both twins. There's many layers. But we came up with contrasting themes, and this first theme, I think, was Wicked Cake, right?
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, it was Wicked Cake, which felt more appropriate for fall. You were the one who was like, "Sexy. Sexy sells." It's perfect for a spring and bloom. It was the right choice for the first issue.
Aliza Abarbanel:
We set the two themes and just went from there.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
What is Cake Zine, for our listeners who are just getting acquainted? Tanya, I'll start with you.
Tanya Bush:
We are a literary magazine. We're independent, we're print only. We explore the intersection between sweets and culture. Sweets and society is the tagline on our website. We publish things that are traditionally found in food magazines, like recipes and reported features and essays, but then, also, non-traditional formats like listicles, taxonomies, fiction, poetry, all different kinds of forms.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Artists' statements, et cetera. And I think we've become known for having very niche themes that we blow out into very different interpretations. Our first two issues, as we mentioned, were Sexy Cake, which was about sexuality and dessert, and then, Wicked Cake, which was the dark side, so witchcraft, poisoning, diet culture, et cetera. This year, our spring-summer issue was Humble Pie, and we are working on Tough Cookie to come out right around the holidays.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
How did you decide on working together in terms of recipe development, in terms of contributor writing, in terms of editing and putting it all together? How have you found that balance within your relationship, as friends, and also as co-editors?
Aliza Abarbanel:
I think it's all pretty collaborative. Well, the magazine is just one part of what Cake Zine is also. We also have an active newsletter. We have a social presence. We do multiple events per issue that are quite large events, and we will do merch and food collab and other things. I think, within those areas, we divide them up, but when it comes to coming up with the actual magazine, I would say it's a very collaborative process that starts when we set the theme. We immediately start ideating about what could be inside of it, and then, we have a pitch call from there. And then, when we divide up the stories that are being edited and worked on, we have some approaches. Tanya definitely works on the recipes more closely than I do, and also, the fiction, because I don't have a fiction editing background at all, but I think, beyond that, we all touch everything. Does that sound true to you?
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, definitely. We were building the plane as we flew it at the beginning, so we've had to institute different parameters and areas of expertise along the way, but it is very much, especially in the early stages of ideating around a new theme and what we want an issue to look like. Aliza and I are constantly touching every piece in the magazine. I like to see everything before we're looking at it on proof.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Magazines are so expensive to run, even for big corporations, to print them, to edit them, color costs money, all of it costs money. How did you think about the financial aspect of it?
Aliza Abarbanel:
We are a self-funded and self-sustaining publication, which means that all of the money that comes from sales or from merch or other things go back into the magazine, which we use to pay contributors and pay for print and things like that, but we don't pay ourselves with the magazine.
Tanya Bush:
Not yet.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Not yet.
Tanya Bush:
And we know we work many other jobs, and I think not only is it balancing who does what in the magazine, but how do we balance our work with Cake Zine with everything else that we do. But I think, because we created it for the sense of doing this idea and see all this potential to do that, that is how we get paid. And then, the financial component is, what is the nicest possible thing we can make where we still have money to do all of those other things?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah. And to be very clear, we're interested in becoming financially sustainable. It's just that there's not really a clear path towards that end, and we've only been around a year and a half. It's something we're interested in doing, in developing a way for this magazine to become self-sustaining.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah, that'd be beautiful.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I will also say, we grow every year in terms of not only our sales, but working with advertisers, other kinds of partnerships. I think that there are probably different paths forward, but in terms of the amount of time we put in on the magazine, if we were being paid minimum wage hourly, there'd be no money left in the magazine. It is a huge effort that we do, and I think it comes from a mixture of things, one of which being that we have a very generative friendship and we have so many ideas, and also that we have the ability to make them happen.
I think that Cake Zine has people that show up for us and like what we do and that are up for whatever we're doing, whether it's basically a rave that has cake and magazines at it with tattoos, which are our events, or t-shirts or other kinds of things, everything makes sense for us as long as the idea is couched in our perspective and the kind of work that we do. So even though the money isn't coming into my personal bank account, I see so much value in that.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I love that a lot because I feel like, normally, when you are taking on investor capital or fundraising, there's a certain expectation that your investors have in how much they can offer creatively if they're not as creative as well. It's refreshing to use the first few years to play around and see what works, see what doesn't work, and not feel the fiduciary responsibility to deliver and more lean in on the creative, so congrats on just being able to get issues and stuff out and just thinking really critically about the financial part of it too.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, and I think, to call back to what Aliza said about having a generative friendship, Cake Zine is just really fun. It's an opportunity to work with cool people, our peers. It's a way for us to explore different aspects of our interest in food, so even if it isn't financially remunerative at this moment, it is emotionally and spiritually remunerative.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Oh. I love that.
Tanya Bush:
That's a $5 word, also.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, you're welcome.
Tanya Bush:
Let's look it up after.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
When you think of the work that you've done with the magazine, what do you think about the future of zines and independent publishing, and how do you hope that particular movement helps influence the food industry at large, particularly in media?
Aliza Abarbanel:
I think it's a complicated question. Just as somebody that has worked in editorial and media for a long time, I respect everybody that works in media so deeply. I think people are doing really amazing work. And then, at the same time, I think that the financial model for success, especially at scale, is very unclear, and I think a lot of the people in power probably don't know what they're doing either. I see smaller publications, I think there's so much freedom in that, and at the same time, it's hard because we're not paying ourselves to do Cake Zine, so I can't recommend that as a viable business model to somebody else because we have all the freelance jobs and the full-time jobs and everything else that makes it happen, but that isn't possible for everybody.
I think, when we first started, we talked to Anja, who's at Broccoli Magazine, about distribution and stockists, and she said, "So many indie magazines ask me about this. If I could find a way to create a system that indie mags could buy into so that distribution and stockists and printing could be easier for everyone, I would love to do that as a business." And I think I would love to see that for people as well, because we've had to learn so much in terms of finding distribution and stockists and paying sales tax and all those other things that, when you work at a giant publication, there's a whole separate side of the business that does that. I think that's one of the biggest obstacles for indie mags is that making the magazine is maybe 30% of the work.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
You just mentioned Anja at Broccoli magazine. But how have you found support ... Cake Zine is very community-driven, it's very rooted in collaborations and partnerships. How do you think about incorporating community into the work? And how do you think about the magazine as a platform for creatives in the food world to be able to share their stuff in a much more tangible way?
Tanya Bush:
I love that question. We started the magazine with a robust food network already, just because I was coming from a restaurant space and Aliza was coming from the food journalism background, but I think we're always trying to expand that beyond. Cake Zine is not necessarily just for people who self-identify as food folks. We're for people who think of food as another way into culture in the same way they think of cinema and fashion and art.
I think we're always trying to expand the bounds of what it means to be a part of a food community, and that you don't necessarily need to be a restaurant cook or a baker or someone who works in a test kitchen, that there are so many different ways to come into and approach food, and that's the ethos of Cake Zine, is that we have all these different kinds of artists and creators and makers at different junctures in their careers all talking about this really niche theme and coming at it from a variety of different approaches.
Every issue, we open up a pitch call, and we have hundreds and hundreds of people submit to us. And then, we also approach writers and artists and bakers and chefs that we admire and ask them if they have any ideas that might work for the current theme. In this way, we both are curating, and then, enabling Cake Zine to be open to all.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Definitely. And I think the whole origin story of Cake Zine was wanting to make something together and with other people, and I think that's something we always try to hold at the core. That's also the reason why events have become a big thing of what we do, is that there are so many people that have worked on it with us, people who either, in the beginning, were doing it for free, or now, we still can't pay the rate that a very talented writer or photographer or, regardless of talent, anyone really deserves to be paid. And they do it because they want to make something with us, and I think that being able to gather and celebrate that, and then, also bring in tattoo artists or DJs or bakers who don't have pieces in the issue but are making desserts for the event, that's always that we expand what Cake Zine is and grow it further.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
This is a perfect segue to talk about events. You guys have some of the most popping events in town. I feel like every Cake Zine party is a fun rave with food and good people and just such unique ideas. When you were thinking about publicizing the magazine, making the magazine known, what was the thought process of events and the community gathering?
Aliza Abarbanel:
It was very core. I think the idea behind Sexy Cake as our first theme was that we thought people would want to come to a party that was called Sexy Cake, and they did. We had never done an event for the magazine before and it was our first issue, so we didn't really know who was going to come at all. And I think that seeing so many people come, not just people that we hold in community and that we care very deeply about, but people that have no idea what we're doing and just followed us on Instagram, that gave us the confidence that there was interest in what we were doing and that we were on the right path.
But I have a bit of an events production background. I was a part of an experimental theater collective when I was in college where-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
So fun.
Aliza Abarbanel:
... we did a party that was, every room was a different kind of party, like a sleepover or the adult party with the standup jazz band, that kind of thing. I think I always have been really interested in the idea of gathering people in unconventional ways, and cake is a party food. It just makes sense to do that. And I guess the final piece is that Tanya and I both like going out.
Tanya Bush:
Totally.
Aliza Abarbanel:
We know a good party.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, and I also think we want to bring the magazine to life. Not everyone is buying the magazine. It's $24 right now, which is as low as we can make it for the cost that we're printing at. If someone can't afford to buy the magazine, they can come and experience the party and they can watch a humbling pie eating contest where we're tying up five different food community members and having them body a cherry pie in front of 800 people, or they can get a tattoo that is inspired by the issue, or eat something that was in a recipe from the volume. It's very much a way of bringing to life this thing that we've labored over and that exists only in a physical way into a community-based space.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Also, it's good for marketing, not that we do it for that reason, but we had 800 people at our last launch party for Humble Pie at Public Records, which was so amazing, and everyone was taking video of this insane pieing contest that we did and sharing it. And I think that, when you are a small publication, the biggest thing you have is your reach and the people that support you. Every party is a good opportunity to expand our orbit.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. I didn't have a chance to go to the New York one, but luckily, timing worked out, and you also had a Humble Pie party in Paris. I know your designer is based out there. How did it feel taking Cake Zine off the American shores and internationally? And what did you feel like the reception was for that?
Aliza Abarbanel:
It was so fun. I think I was nervous. Were you nervous?
Tanya Bush:
I was a little nervous, but I had faith. We just always have people coming out to our parties, and we had 80 people come to the bar and want to celebrate this somewhat distinctly feeling American issue because pie is not really a French thing. I guess they have tartes. We had a ton of, obviously, expats, but then, also, native Parisians and whatnot coming to want to celebrate and to eat beautiful pies by Andrea Sham and ...
Aliza Abarbanel:
Alina Prokopenko, which was great. And I think that also is, we have a following, so we were sharing the event, but our designer and art director Noah lives in Paris, the pastry chefs we were working with live in Paris, and we had the event at Combat, which is a great cocktail bar that has its own community in the Buttes Chaumont neighborhoods, so we weren't doing it alone. I think that's also a part of it is that, when you work with other people, then, they bring their people in as well.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Can you tell us a little bit about the newest issue that's coming up?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yes. It's called Tough Cookie, and it's all about toughness and adversity and triumph, and also cookies, in all of those ways.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, we're super excited. We have such a fun lineup with people approaching the topic from very different modes. We've got Sabrina Imbler writing a piece on the cookie-cutter shark, which is a shark the size of a house cat that gouges holes out of it's prey. It takes down blue whales. It's this wild piece that Aliza solicited, and I'm so excited about it.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, Sabrina wrote an amazing book called How Far The Light Reaches. They're a science journalist, mostly marine science, and this is a book of essays that is connecting their identities and also different sea creatures in kinds of ways, and I love that book so much. I just started hitting them up with links to different Wikipedia marine animals that have "cookie" in the name and the cookiecutter shark is one that we landed on, and they're writing about using the cookiecutter shark as a model to be taking bites out of things that are much bigger than yourself.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Wow. Biting off more than you can chew.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Literally. I should have said that. That's a piece I'm really excited about. I'm really excited about a piece that Soobin Kim is writing for us about a factory in Toronto, makes Oreo cookies and other very large-scale cookies, and it's a story about immigration in Canada and all of these different people that work there who had very different jobs and different lives in the countries they lived in before they came to Canada, and how making cookies has created this new space for them to exist in an existing community with one another that I think is really fun.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Tanya, do you want to talk about the fiction, maybe?
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, I was going to say that this is actually the most fiction we've ever published in an issue. We have Hillary Leichter, who just had a book out called “Terrace Story,” from Riverhead, that's amazing. And she also wrote Temporary, writing this surreal flash fiction about a woman who moves back to her family home, and I won't really give any more away about that, but-
Aliza Abarbanel:
It's not as it seems.
Tanya Bush:
It is. Nothing is as it seems with Hillary Leichter. We have Catherine Lacey, who wrote the Biography of X, writing about a viral cookie line, and we have Melissa Lozada-Oliva, who has this freaky, sci-fi-y, alienesque listening story that is really cool. It's been really fun to keep bringing in more fiction into the magazine. That's felt like a priority to have literary forms, and we're really excited about these authors.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, the recipes are also really exciting and we just did our photo shoot, so it's very top of mind for us. We've always done very unusual photo shoots. Our Wicked Cake photo shoot, we shot haunted looking cakes in an abandoned church in Flatbush, which had no electricity, everything was under dry ice so it wouldn't melt. But for Tough Cookie, we shot people for the first time.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Very cute.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, it was really special and fun. We brought in Abby Bellingi, who has a recipe in the issue. It's a guava hard candy-stained glass cookie. She was one of our models. And then, we had Meruin Kareem, who's a very close friend of ours, and then, Alan Yoho, who is a friend who has been one of our earliest Cake Zine supporters. We thought we would bring in some of our own tough cookies to be eating the cookies for the shoot. Tanya, I don't know if you want to mention one or two other cookies?
Tanya Bush:
We have six recipes, which is also, I think, the highest number we've ever done?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah.
Tanya Bush:
We've got an amazing crème brûlée cookie from Chloe-Rose Crabtree, who is the pastry chef at Bake Street in London. It's this laborious cookie where you have to make a crème pât, you roll it out, there's a freezing process, but it's so delicious. It cracks like it's a crème brûlée, and a gooey, oozing center.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Oh, nice.
Tanya Bush:
It's really, really delicious. We were all super excited to eat it at the shoot. And then, Caroline Schiff did a contemporary riff on the black and white cookie. She did a coconut black and white, which is so perfect for the holidays that are coming up in December, for Hanukkah, and it's just such a nostalgic, delicious take on a classic.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
That's awesome. I'm dubbing this our manifestation moment on the podcast. You have three issues under your belt with the fourth set to come out. Where do you hope to see Cake Zine in the next three to five issues? Are there future guests you want? Are there celebrities you want to have a piece of that Cake Zine? What are some dreams that you guys have been manifesting?
Aliza Abarbanel:
We have a lot of different ... We have a whole Slack that's just called "Good ideas" that-
Abena Anim-Somuah:
I love that.
Aliza Abarbanel:
... random hours, especially ... We hang out a lot as friends, so we'll be doing a friend hang and then we start talking about work stuff and then, I'll just go in there. Something that's more far afield. Do you want to tell them about our concept?
Tanya Bush:
I actually did mention this in the Cherry Bombe issue, but we love to flirt with the idea of a natural wine dessert bar with a listening room attached. Maybe it's a techno club ...
Aliza Abarbanel:
It changes by the day.
Tanya Bush:
It changes by the day.
Aliza Abarbanel:
With a magazine shop in the front. We were inspired by Noble Rot, which is a great natural wine publication that's based in the UK, and they have multiple wine bars in London now that grew out of the restaurant. And I think that, obviously, Tanya is a fantastic pastry chef, and some of our very close collaborators, Casey Paganelli and Daniel Levy, that produce all of the parties with us.
We always just talk about how there's a feeling at the Cake Zine party that's so special, and that it would be so fun if we could have a more permanent place for that community. And Casey has a restaurant background, and also, we're all very interested in dancing and nightlife, which is where the DJ component at our parties comes in. That is the idea behind our to be titled wine bar, magazine shop, dessert ... I don't even know.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
And then, how about for yourselves? I know you have your book's coming out too, and that's going to be a new chapter of your career and I feel like you're always constantly writing interesting stuff. You seem to also love to travel as well. What are your personal dreams and aspirations for yourselves as you continue to spend more time in food and the food industry?
Tanya Bush:
I have really been enjoying writing more. I just released this piece in Guernica about this strange stint I had in Italy, and I'd love to be doing more long form writing once I have the book behind me, if that will ever actually happen, but is hard to envision right now.
But yeah, I think continuing to collaborate with good people. I want Cake Zine to be thriving. I want to be spending a lot of time with Aliza. Maybe we're neighbors at that point. I don't know. I don't like to plan ahead of ton, honestly. I like to see where things take me and go with the flow. It's a little bit more who I am.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Well, I want to be producing the International Tanya Bush Book Tour party series, obviously.
Tanya Bush:
Oh, I want to be a Häagen-Dazs global ambassador. That's actually a massive ambition of mine.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Wow. Manifest away.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I think, for myself, I would like to be doing more writing. Most of my work these days is editing-based. I edit a couple newsletters, and obviously, Taste and Cake Zine as well. Writing is the thing that I always put to the bottom of the list, which means that I never do it. I would like to be doing more of that.
And then, at the same time, I really like doing collaborative multidisciplinary work with other people. I think it'll be really fun to do something that's video based. I think it would be really fun to be just continuing all the other things to do with Cake Zine in terms of the merch collabs.
I always joke about the fact that every man in Lower Manhattan says that they're a creative director. And I would never say that about myself, but I do feel like the work that we do with Cake Zine, a lot of it is being a creative director because there's so much to that, and I think that that's not something I would've said I was comfortable with, but now I do. I trust myself and I trust the people that we work with even more, and I think that I would like to just continue on that path even further and be doing things in five years that I didn't even know were possible right now.
And I think the creative director proliferance comes partially from the fact that so much of the way content exists these days. It's not just on one stream but multiple streams. So it's on social, it's on a podcast, and then, also written component, and I don't ...
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Lifestyle.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah, who even knows what that means? For me, in our work, what it means is that I have a vision for Cake Zine and the kind of work that we want to be doing, and I just want to see that live in as many different formats as possible.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Do you have any advice for creatives or people who are starting to discover this love of food for themselves but aren't quite sure how to get their work out there or get to meet people and build that community, especially in New York?
Tanya Bush:
Cake Zine would never have started if Aliza and I hadn't come together and thought we could produce a bake sale together, and then make a small little indie magazine, and then do this full scale production that we're now dedicating our lives to. I think riffing with other people and having conviction is such a beautiful way to get into the food space.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Tanya, I want to ask you something that I don't think I've ever asked you before, which is about the origin of your Instagram and how you started getting a following on there, because it's hard. I think social can be so oversaturated these days, but I do think of you as somebody who had an Instagram account that was not attached to yourself as a brand at all, but that was completely distinctive and one of a kind, and that's how I found you or how you found me, and I think you have grown a lot organically through that, so I'm curious about that.
Tanya Bush:
It was a very particular moment in time in which we were all cloistered away in our homes and spending a lot of time on the internet and feeling an ambient sense of dread, so this project that I'd created, which was very much distinctly not me-centric, took off.
Aliza Abarbanel:
And just, if you're listening and you haven't seen it, the concept is basically that Tanya's posting these desserts that she's made with these beautiful literary captions, "Will this make me happy?" The answer is always, "No, that baking cannot cure anxiety or these other things," which flies in the face of what a lot of food publication headlines would say, like antidepressant biscuits, I think, as a concept. And when we met, when I started reading your Instagram, this is why I wanted to meet you in person, is because I was like, "This is deranged. Who is this person?" It stood out, and it was so different.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
And then, you found out she was a Scorpio.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah. Then, it was game over.
Tanya Bush:
Love at first sight.
Aliza Abarbanel:
I had worked in food media for many years at that point. I was all over Instagram all of the time, and what you were doing was so distinctive. And I think that my advice for people is, to be out there, you need to put yourself out there, and you should put yourself out there, so not what you see other publications doing, but what only you can offer. And then, by doing that, you can connect with other people who are vibing with you and get into that collaboration that Tanya and I are talking about.
I also do think it matters to have exposure and validity from mainstream publications. Frankly, I wish that was not always the case, but it is. My freelance writing, I think, is a big part of that. Not to promote myself, but I actually did write a big Google Doc guide to pitching that I have linked on my website that I do know a lot of people that use it, and it's a very much basic guide to, this is how you write an email, this is what clips you should have in it. This is the difference between pitching a story and pitching a topic.
And I think that you just have to do exposure. I spent years and years writing terrible blog posts before I got to start writing bigger clips, but I do think that having that practice of working with editors and getting that exposure is meaningful and will matter when you want to do a popup and you can include a link to an article that you've written.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Yeah. I think what you're saying, though, is that it takes a village, and often, getting anywhere you can get and food takes a lot of people behind you, and just being really aware of which types of people you choose to help, which types of friendships stem from that. Also, just being a little bit confident, just being like, "This is what I can offer."
Aliza Abarbanel:
Yeah. There's so much work to be done. There's so many popups happening these days that I know people need help staffing with that you can also go to and just meet people that way. I think, especially if you live in a big city, there's so much available to you that you can show up and be a part of. And then, when you are pitching somebody, you're not just a name in an inbox. You are somebody that has proven that you are aware of what's happening and want to be a part of it.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
We are going to do our future flash five. Are you guys ready?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Let's do it.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Awesome. The future of food journalism?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Interdisciplinary.
Tanya Bush:
Experimental.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The future of bakeries?
Tanya Bush:
Proliferating.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Open Late.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The future of cookbooks?
Tanya Bush:
Literary.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Illustrated.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
The future of food events?
Aliza Abarbanel:
Meet cutes.
Tanya Bush:
Cake raves.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
And finally, the future of cake?
Tanya Bush:
Eaten before dinner.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Carrot cake. Then, now, and in the future.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Aliza, Tanya, thank you both so much for joining us on the podcast. If we want to continue to support you, where are the best places to find you?
Aliza Abarbanel:
The best way to find us, www.cakezine.com. We're also on Instagram, @cake_zine, and we have a Substack newsletter, also @cakezine. I guess, stockists all around the world and across the country. And you can find the list of stockists on our website, which is Cake Zine.
Tanya Bush:
You can find me on my website, tanyabush.com. @will.this.make.me.happy on Instagram. The answer's always no.
Aliza Abarbanel:
You can also find her at Little Egg.
Tanya Bush:
You can also find me at Little Egg. That's so true.
Aliza Abarbanel:
And you can also find me at Little Egg eating the pastries. And when I'm not there, I'm on Instagram at @alizarae, A-L-I-Z-A-R-A-E.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Thank you both so much.
Tanya Bush:
Yeah, it was so fun.
Aliza Abarbanel:
We could just talk all day.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
Before we go, our guest is going to leave a voicemail at the Future Of Food mailbox, just talking to themselves 10 years from now. You have reached The Future Of Food Is You mailbox. Please leave your message after the beep.
Tanya Bush:
Hey, I don't know what you'll be doing in 10 years, but I hope you'll be eating brioche, so here's a recipe that I love. Start with 1,000 grams of flour and 25 grams of fresh yeast. Then, add 300 grams of cool water, 20 grams of salt, 150 grams of sugar, and 300 grams of eggs, and set the mixer on medium. After 10 minutes, start adding 250 grams of butter at room temperature, little by little, and beat for another 10 minutes. Then, let it rest and rise in the fridge until tomorrow. Then, you can shape it. Let it proof for a couple of hours, then bake. I like thinking about how you'll make the bread not knowing how you'll eat it, just like I don't know how this voicemail will be received 10 years from now.
Aliza Abarbanel:
Hi. I have no idea what life will be like in 10 years, so I'm going to treat this voicemail as a little check-in to remind myself how this day in my life felt. Right now, it's Yom Kippur, in fact, and I went to Kol Nidre with Tanya last night, so I'm feeling a little reflective. After taping this episode, we're going to Times Square to look for Cookie Monster. Yes, really. We're scouting for a photographer who is shooting a portrait to accompany an interview with somebody who dresses up in the costume for our next issue of Cake Zine, a real tough cookie job if there ever was one. I love that this is the work we have made for ourselves, and no matter what is happening in the future, I hope the spirit hasn't changed.
Abena Anim-Somuah:
That's it for today's show. Do you know someone who you think is the future of food? Tell us about them. Nominate them at the link in our show notes, or leave us a rating and a review and tell me about them in the review. I can't wait to read more about them. Thanks to Kerrygold for sponsoring our show. The Future Of Food Is You is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Thanks to the team at CityVox Studios, executive producers Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, and associate producer Jenna Sadhu. Catch you on the future flip.