The idea for Cake Zine was born during the pandemic – a time when baking proliferated online and pastries became something of a cultural obsession. “We saw an opportunity to create a literary food publication, an interdisciplinary print magazine that blended sweets, literature and unconventional storytelling,” its co-founders and editors, Tanya Bush and Aliza Abarbanel, tell CR.

Both of the founders come from food backgrounds originally; Bush is a writer and baker and Abarbanel used to be an editor at food magazine Bon Appétit. “Part of the idea stemmed from our frustration with mainstream food coverage, which felt formulaic. We wanted to approach dessert as more than just aesthetics or indulgence, exploring it as an artistic and intellectual space rather than a trend.”

Released in 2022, debut issue Sexy Cake explored how cakes have tempted and tantalised us since the dawn of dessert, featuring everything from phallic pastries to cake-sitting. Three years on and the team is now on their sixth issue, regularly publishing a mix of voices ranging from professional food writers and chefs to award-winning novelists and first-time writers.

“We publish two issues a year, each built around a hyper-specific theme consisting of a food item and narrowing device, which has made it easy to define what a Cake Zine story looks like,” they explain.

“Every issue starts with an extremely detailed open pitch call, and we receive many hundreds of submissions from writers, artists and creatives across disciplines. From the beginning, we’ve prioritised subversions of theme, unconventional storytelling formats, and deeply researched writing that contextualises the history of food culture.”

In that time, some topics have naturally lent themselves to more playful angles. Humble Pie, for instance, included broad interpretations of humiliation and piping hot servings of contrition. Others have tended towards darker, more transgressive explorations, such as Wicked Cake’s exploration of the sinister side of sweets. “But we always aim for a balance in tone,” they add.

Led by designer and art director Noah Emrich, Cake Zine’s covers always play into an overarching direction based on the issue’s themes. In Candy Land, which incorporates land use and colonisation alongside candy and sweets, he used type reminiscent of American cowboy westerns, cotton candy colours, and the metallic and pearlescent materials typically found in candy packaging.

Inside its pages, however, the art doesn’t follow an overarching direction or aesthetic. “Instead, we select artists who we are excited by and pair them with the stories we believe them to be well suited for. We almost exclusively work with illustrators and artists we discover through our open pitch calls. For many of our illustrators, Cake Zine is their first publication in print,” say the founders.

The latest issue, Daily Bread, is their first explicit foray beyond sweets, and explores how “bread is both physically important and deeply intertwined with daily life”. Jordan Kisner examines how a schism over offering gluten-free eucharist tore a Catholic church apart in upstate New York; Daniel Varghese explores wheat as currency and strategy in the board game Catan; and there’s even bread as performance art with a deconstruction of Breadface’s viral video project by Nicolaia Rips.

Meanwhile, the cover design is an intentional nod to the issue’s biblical overtones. “We chose to lean into that and imitate the bibles and hymnals you might find in the back of a church pew. The issue is wrapped in a red cover stock with a leather embossed texture and finished with gold foil for the title and border. The typeface used for the title was lifted from a fairly generic bible,” they explain.

Looking at Cake Zine’s trajectory over the last three years, its cultural servings are clearly resonating with readers (particularly those of us with more of a sweet tooth). The title has grown to include over 100 stockists around the world, been nominated for a James Beard Award, and hosted a number of sold-out events.

Asked what’s next for them, the founders’ answer is simple: “More issues! Our seventh issue Forbidden Fruit is open for pitches through [this month] – more readings, more restaurant pop-ups, and more unexpected explorations of food culture.”

Cake Zine Volume 6: Daily Bread is out now; cakezine.com