Aliza Abarbanel, Cake Zine
This week we’re At Work With Aliza Abarbanel, one of the co-founders of Cake Zine, the New York literary mag exploring art, history, and pop culture through food.
Aliza is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Alongside her role on Cake Zine, she’s a contributing editor at Taste and a co-host of the podcast ‘This is Taste,’ and a former editor at Bon Appetit. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, GQ, Food & Wine, Eater, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.
She’s also a strong proponent for indie magazines; here, she gives us the lowdown on Cake Zine as she and co-founder Tanya Bush launch their seventh issue.
What are you doing this morning?
My morning always starts with coffee. I worked as a barista in college and still have the high caffeine tolerance to prove it, although I’m actually not that picky about the coffee itself. If my girlfriend and I are both working from home, we make a big Chemex pour-over to fuel our separate breakfasts (eggs for her, Greek yogurt with some kind of fruit for me). Otherwise, I do a French press for simplicity.
I typically work from home on Mondays so I can use the day to prepare for whatever is happening later in the week. Today I’m preparing for an interview tomorrow for ‘This is Taste,’ a podcast produced by Penguin Random House that I co-host with Matt Rodbard. I’m speaking with Rosie Grant about her new book ‘To Die For,’ a collection of recipes literally carved into gravestones around the world. I’m fascinated with this phenomenon and I’ve been following her project online for years (@ghostlyarchive), so I’m looking forward to chatting at length.
Also this morning, I’m meeting with my Cake Zine collaborators Tanya Bush and Noah Emrich to set the pitch guide for our new issue. After seven issues themed around dessert, we’re debating doing a one-off issue on a decidedly different theme, so we’re setting expectations around what pitches we’re looking for, and also handling some business for our dinner pop-up at Hellbender in Queens later this week (more on this below).
At our launch party last week, we collected hundreds of anonymous secrets from the attendees (above), so I’m thinking about the best way to share those (a tiny zine?).
Describe your work environment
Unless I’m reviewing a podcast interview, I’m always listening to music. I like to start the morning with the Breakfast Show on NTS—their DJs are always excellent. I’ll rotate between the desk and the couch, punctuated by walks in nearby Fort Greene Park or stints in the kitchen to fix lunch or get dinner going. If I’m recording a podcast in the studio at PRH, I’ll work from the midtown office for the afternoon until the air conditioning is overwhelming.
Which magazine do you first remember?
As an American teenager, I was obsessed with Nylon. I would read the whole issue in one sitting and then make elaborate collages from the fashion spreads to hang on my bedroom walls. It was such a time capsule for the cultural era—indie sleaze, street style etc—and I think it helped me explore identity in a social way, which is such a cool function of magazines, especially ones marketed towards teenagers.
Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine/zine?
I’m always inspired by the writing published in some of our fellow NYC-based indie magazines, like Acacia and The Drift. Their editorial voices are both so clear and unafraid, and I think they’re doing important work publishing the next generation of writers.
I also recently had the pleasure of visiting the fashion magazine archive Library 180 here in NYC (above), where they had a copy of Wet, a magazine for “gourmet bathing” published from 1976-1981. It’s essentially a lifestyle magazine covering the kind of water-based subcultures that thrived in Venice, CA during that period, from surfing and waterbeds to more vaguely water-based fashion editorials. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I especially love seeing the hyperlocal niche ads that were published alongside the content. My eBay alerts are set!
What other piece of media would you recommend?
Whenever I need to knock out a chunk of work, I queue up this set of downtempo UK garage tracks by Physical Therapy on NTS. Something about the tempo switch up just works for my brain…maybe it will for you too.
Describe Cake Zine in three words
Thematic, interdisciplinary, unexpected.
Describe the origins of Cake Zine
Tanya and I met when she slid into my DMs offering some strawberries and cream cookies she had leftover from a pop-up. We met up for cookies and coffee and immediately hit it off. She’s a writer and pastry chef with a background in book publishing, and I was working as an editor at Bon Appetit, so we had a lot of shared interests.
Our first joint project was a mutual aid bake sale fighting food insecurity in NYC that drew from our shared communities—and while we were setting it up, Tanya began pitching me on the idea of an interdisciplinary food magazine that focused on dessert through fiction, essays, poetry, recipes, and more. We thought it would be creatively stimulating to focus on niche themes that are expanded across form, expanding from Sexy Cake and Wicked Cake into Humble Pie, Tough Cookie, Candy Land, Daily Bread, and most recently, Forbidden Fruit.
I think we were always excited by the potential to talk about dessert’s more subversive connections to culture because we view food as inherently social and political, but the variety of topics in the issues is always surprising. Think: the history of baking poison into cake, pie as a metaphor for rejection on Love Island, what it’s like to work as a Cookie Monster mascot in Times Square, why doomsday preppers stockpile candy in their bunkers, and the realities of Palestinians baking bread for survival in the Rafah refugee camp.
How conscious was the choice to adopt a bookish, text-orientated design?
Our art director Noah Emrich narrowed in on Cake Zine’s signature aesthetic from issue one. Most food magazines are driven by photography and recipes, but we’re primarily a literary magazine with original illustrations commissioned for each piece. The difference is intentional. We want the reading experience to be wholly removed from the digital world, without any distracting notifications or open tabs, and the cream paper and dark brown font color are meant to nestle readers in the page.
The writing is very diverse; how do you discover your contributors?
We’ve issued an open pitch call for every issue since issue two, and our most recent pitch call for volume seven (Forbidden Fruit) received over 600 pitches. We also solicit pitches from writers or chefs we admire who might not consider pitching a traditional food magazine. It’s a huge effort to review all the pitches, create a short list for our editorial board to consider, and then make the final lineup of about 30 stories, since we’re limited by page count and budget as a completely independent magazine. We tend to prioritize unconventional takes on the theme and deeply researched writing that contextualizes the history of food culture.
Once the stories are set, we review artists’ portfolio submissions and pair visual contributors for each piece. Most of our illustrators and a good deal of our writers have never been published in print before, so we aim to work with as many new contributors as possible.
A popular topic at the recent Case Sensitive event in NYC was community building; please share your experience with parties and events
The community around Cake Zine has been one of the biggest drivers of our significant events arm. There’s such a huge swath of creatives in NYC who are interested in gathering around independent publishing, readings, and also food pop-ups, and our events combine all of the above. We’ve done huge launch parties, intimate readings, gallery conversations, restaurant pop-ups—even a dessert stand at a rave. Outside of New York, we’ve hosted events in Paris, London, Los Angeles, and Philly.
Events provide financial opportunities (brand partnerships, ticket sales) and publicity/social reach, but mostly, they’re a fun way for us to celebrate our contributors and the larger community. I also love how events provide another opportunity to bring the issue to life—some pieces land completely differently when read aloud, and the magazine itself looks so good in person.
Earlier this month, we did a 450-person launch party at our favorite bar Honey’s with rooftop readings, magazines, and of course, dessert: the cutest airbrushed cakes from Taipei-based baker Fu Cakes, and a literal 10-foot pie (above) from pastry chef Amanda Perdomo, which somehow still disappeared in minutes.
We’re doing another event this Thursday that’s a little more low-key: a dinner at Hellbender in Ridgewood, Queens. Their chef Yara Herrera contributed a guava nicuatole recipe to our most recent issue, so we’re doing a dinner with a whole dessert menu inspired by Forbidden Fruit, plus a pop-up magazine stand with tastings of odd heritage apples from our friend William Mullen, who is deeply plugged into the wild apple scene in the East Coast. Yara’s food is so delicious, so I’m excited to get to hang out and talk about the magazine with everyone who comes through. Reservations are all booked up, but we’re taking walk-ins!
Show us one spread that sums up how the magazine works, and explain why you selected it
This spread is from our newest issue, Forbidden Fruit. I love how we’re able to commission painters and more unexpected visuals artists to create original work for the magazine, especially this story, which focuses on the real life of an undocumented fruiteria worker in Barcelona named Bilal who sells fruit for two euros an hour, 84 hours a week. He’s part of a sprawling subeconomy that is often ignored, and I like how the visual spends so much time and effort capturing his existence in such intricate detail. It mirrors the level of intimacy and care in the piece, which was excerpted in our newsletter here.
What has publishing the magazine taught you that may be helpful to anyone else planning to launch their own publication?
Going from working at legacy media publications like Condé Nast to publishing my own magazine taught me the importance of logistics, business plans, all those boring things. I aspire to be an editor, not a girl boss, so I think my advice would be to find a good business-minded person or publisher to handle that component if figuring out sales tax sounds like a bummer.
On the bright side, I’d also say that I think there’s a lot of power in going “niche” with issue themes or even a concept like a literary dessert magazine. It might seem limiting but I think having a clear point of view can be expansive, both creatively and from an audience POV.
What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
I’m most excited to taste the “odd” heritage apples William is bringing to our Hellbender pop-up on Tuesday. These untamed wild varieties are seriously strange looking, but their rough exterior is paired with special flavor. And once that’s done, I’m looking forward to taking some time to decompress after a long month of events: going to the farmers market, making soup, reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s new memoir.