It's been a banner few years for cake, with pandemic baking giving way to a new trend in pastry that is decidedly weird and more than a little messy. While cake might once have been the luxe stuff of Marie Antoinette and debutante cotillions, today’s cakes are all about a DIY aesthetic and an in-your-face vibe, and there’s no better distillation of that approach than Tanya Bush and Aliza Abarbanel’s new zine Sexy Cake.
The food writer and baker compiled recipes, essays, illustrations, poems, and photographs to ponder the meaning of cake from every possible angle, including a photo essay featuring iced confections from the likes of Pretty Shitty Cakes, Mehreen Karim, and Gigi’s Little Kitchen, a history of erotic bakeries in New York City, and an interview with the artist and sex worker Lindsay Dye about her former career as a cake-sitter (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like). This week, Vogue spoke to Bush and Arbanel about their views on cake as creative fuel, their zine-making process, and the cult of femininity in relation to dessert.
Just to get the obvious question out of the way: why cake?
Tanya Bush: Well, cake has enormous symbolic power in culture and ritual and art, but for me personally, I’m a baker, so I think about dessert and cake all the time. I eat it a lot, and I watch other people consume it. I think that a lot of people see dessert as an unnecessary indulgence, or something without substance, and I was interested in probing it more critically and thinking about sweets as something significant. There are fertility traditions and gender roles and rituals around cake, so I felt that it sort of could accommodate broad exploration. It’s also a pleasurable pursuit – it’s something that is highly consumable and enormously symbolic, and that interplay really excited me.
How did you go about putting together a dream list of artists and contributors?
Aliza Abarbanel: The genesis of this project, for us, is that Tanya and I organised a big community bake sale at the end of last year benefiting two different mutual aid groups here in New York. There were 14 different bakers, so we spent a lot of time assembling pastry boxes and running things down Bowery, and we had a lot of time to talk about cake in that moment, because there was a lot of cake happening at the bake sale. That’s when we started talking about how it’d be fun to make a zine to kind of explore the significance of cake in different ways, and some of the people who participated in the mutual aid bake sale also have work that’s featured.
TB: Nicole Jones, who contributed an essay and a recipe for Better Than Sex Cake, which is a popular cake in the Mormon community that she grew up in, contributed cookies to the bake sale. Mehreen Karim, who did one of the cakes that we shot as our “sexy centrefolds”, contributed to the bake sale, and the designer who made the flyer for the bake sale was our designer and art director for the zine. So we did start with some people from that and then kind of reached out to our networks that we know either personally or professionally – to give them this prompt of “sexy cake” and see what sounded interesting to them – and just kind of worked from there. Because this is our first-ever publication and it’s a pretty bootstrapped, DIY, self-funded endeavour, we thought it was best to kind of start from there and then work outwards.
Representations of cake are often very feminine; were you thinking about the project from a specifically feminist or gendered lens?
AA: We started by combing through these old cookbooks and seeing that food and sex were often linked as a formula for male seduction. These authors were prescribing women’s gender roles and sexual roles, and we’ve seen how this dynamic has continued and in different forums; there was the heyday of those sickly sweet celebrity perfumes, and those Corona ads where women are bobbing up and down, and I think our zine is sort of interested in turning those tropes on their heads and thinking about baking and cake and dessert more generally as a source of pleasure for one’s own self. I wrote a recipe in the zine that sort of centres the sensuality of the act of baking, but it’s doing so in a masturbatory way, rather than for a man’s pleasure. There’s an advertisement in the zine by a really talented designer named Mariah Rodriguez, who takes the trope of Betty Crocker and reimagines her in a contemporary context as a dominatrix. Nikolaia Rips, one of our writers, wrote this funny, sexy piece about dousing herself in birthday-cake body wash for the sake of her own teenage fantasies. The zine is very much interested in indulgence and passion and maximalism and freedom of exploration and play, but it’s sort of taking these tropes that have existed when it comes to thinking about women as consumable desserts, and turning them on their heads. Something that I want to praise Tanya for is centring the baker themself; within the sexuality of desserts, I think it’s always been focused on eating the cake, and maybe not the actual labor or essential process that goes into making it. That’s what I think is so special about the mousse recipe; if you have ever worked with chocolate or heavy cream, it’s so sensual and indulgent in a really beautiful way.
What does the zine production process look like for you?
TB: It’s all happening right now. We’re kind of at the point where we’re in touch with some stockists in the city and reaching out to more, and we’re also planning a launch party next Thursday at Honey’s, where, in addition to being able to buy the zine, people will be able to have some cake and drink and also maybe get a tattoo or listen to DJs. It’s going to be really sick.
What do you think about the cultural moment that cake is having right now?
TB: Even before we started this process, I think there was a lot of cake represented in our Instagram feeds. At this point, when I open Instagram, cake is all I see. It’s the algorithm, obviously, but I think in general, people have an interest in consuming these very beautiful, opulent, unconventional cakes, either literally or digitally. People are looking to mark moments in their life with food right now, and I think cake is a great way to do that. When we were thinking about how to categorise cuisine, we knew that we wanted to do two contrasting themes, so Sexy Cake is the first one and then in the fall, we hope to be doing Wicked Cake as well, to touch on the dark side of dessert, as it were.
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