A conversation with Cake Zine founders, Tanya Bush and Aliza Abarbanel.

What happens when a pastry chef meets a magazine editor in Brooklyn? No, this isn’t the setup for a joke that perhaps three people might ever find funny. But…what do you get when a pastry chef meets a magazine editor in Brooklyn?

You get the start of a media brand and a movement and a community. In other words, you get Cake Zine.

Started as a post-pandemic stab at reconnecting with the world, Cake Zine is the result of that meet-cute. Tanya Bush, the pastry chef, and Aliza Abarbanel, a magazine editor, took their love of sweets and have created a magazine that is kind of like what you might get if a literary magazine developed a sweet tooth.

And threw great parties.

Not just in Brooklyn, but in LA, and London, and Paris. And that might become, who knows, not just a new sort of literary salon, but an actual salon. Or cake shop/wine bar. Or a publisher.

Tanya and Aliza have plans—perhaps too many—but for now, they are content with creating a smart and tasty magazine that blends fiction, essays, and recipes in a lovingly-blended, skillfully-layered cake.

And. They. Have. Plans.

But they are also realists and wise enough to know that you can’t rush a soufflé. Lest it collapse. Much like these tortured, yeasty metaphors.

Arjun Basu: Okay. Aliza and Tanya will, I’ll ask the question of both of you. So we’ll start with Aliza. We’ll go alphabetically. How did you get here? How did you get to Cake Zine?

Aliza Abarbanel: My journey to Cake Zine comes from my background in editorial working at different magazines. I worked at Bon Appetit as an editor for three and a half years, which is the time period that Tanya and I met and became friends.

And then when I was leaving to go freelance as a writer and editor, and I actually do a podcast myself Tanya pitched the idea of Cake Zine to me, which maybe we can revisit, but I come from a magazine background. I’m a real lover of making magazines and I had experience working at big companies like writing for lots of different publications. But certainly founding an indie magazine, I think, has taught me a completely different set of skills and way of doing things.

Arjun Basu: Tanya?

Tanya Bush: Yeah I am a pastry chef. I’m the sort of “cake” arm of the magazine itself.

Arjun Basu: So you are Cake. And Aliza is Zine.

Tanya Bush: I would like to say we’re like a hearty mix of both perhaps, but Aliza doesn’t bake quite as much as I do given that I don’t have to, cause I have Tanya in my life, so exactly. She makes the savory and I make the sweet. It’s a perfect combination. So yeah, I briefly worked in book publishing when I graduated from college and then took a sharp turn into the restaurant industry and cooking world and began baking professionally.

And I guess. 2021. At this point and yeah, Aliza and I had worked together on a mutual aid bake sale in December of 2022. And it was that moment during the pandemic where cakes were experiencing this. It was the heyday of cakes. It was December of 2021 also, sorry, December of 2021. And everyone was ogling these like incredible concoctions and confections online. And, just getting really excited about the confectionary world in a way that maybe we hadn’t been seeing quite as much prior. And I was thinking about how there wasn’t really like an interdisciplinary magazine that was marrying literary culture and poetry and fiction and less traditional magazine formats with food and specifically with dessert.

And so it just felt like the prime moment for something like that. And I pitched Aliza on the idea. We were assembling hundreds and hundreds of boxes for this mutual aid sale. And I said, what do you think about a magazine about cake?

Arjun Basu: And what was her reaction to that, Aliza?

Aliza Abarbanel: I thought it was a great topic. I think that, like, when you think about significance of food, certainly all foods are significant, but I think cake and dessert in general hits on this interesting nexus point—not essential for sustenance or survival, and at the same point, deeply essential for so many personal and familial and cultural experiences around the world.

I think everyone has their own kind of experience, fake and pop culture moment, or like certainly their own lives. But I think I said, “I don’t know about a whole magazine just about cake. Maybe we should do two issues with contesting themes and go from there.” Which I think was a fun kind of editorial exercise as well, to think about if there’s just two cake issues, like how do they relate to each other?

So we actually came up with the second issue theme first which was Wicked Cake, which is the dark side of dessert. So witchcraft, poisoning, diet, culture, colonialism, things of that ilk, which I think was originally based on one of Tanya’s kind of historical tidbits about cake that she was flinging at me as we were talking about them.

I think you said something about how arsenic was disguised in sugar a lot in the Victorian era, which I thought seemed pretty diabolical for a dessert magazine. And then to contrast that we thought, Sex sells, and it would be our summer issue and that it seemed maybe like more of a thematic fit for that time of year.

So Sexy Cake ended up being our first issue.

Arjun Basu: So I guess the next question is like, what is Cake Zine really? Because it’s a magazine, there’s a website, there’s a substack, you have the parties, you have merch, which is great. I love the last one. I love the Candy Land t shirt. It’s just great. If someone is listening to this and they asked you, “What is Cake Zine?” What would you say?

Aliza Abarbanel: I’d say it’s a funny question because we have not done cake as a topic for—we’re going into our third year of not having cake. And also I think a zine has a certain connotation of something that’s very Xerox and handmade.

And I think we did think we were making that, but it ended up becoming something bigger. So perhaps it’s easier to say what Cake Zine is not, which is it’s not a zine about cake. It’s, I would say, a cultural exploration of the way that dessert interacts with society. Although we do savory occasionally as well. Tanya, what would you say?

Arjun Basu: Cake Zine. Neither ‘cake’ nor ‘zine.’

Tanya Bush: Yeah, as we go into our new issue of Daily Bread, we're straying farther and farther away from the sweetness of the pastry case, but I think while also managing the integrity of what it means to be a food-oriented and, like, specifically baking-oriented magazine.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I would also say what’s a very signature Cake Zine thing is that we come up with these themes that are seemingly very niche and then explode them in so many different interpretations, both in terms of form and who’s contributing and then also just the topic itself. So we’ve been playing a lot with idioms and phrases lately.

So we did Candy Land, which was riffing off of this board game that I think a lot of people probably played growing up, but exploring how candy and the land intersect with each other. Before that was Tough Cookie, which was about toughness and triumph and adversity and cookies. And there’s a story in that issue about a shark that has nothing to do with cookies at all, except for the fact that it happens to be named the Cookiecutter Shark.

So I think finding these pockets of where we can intersect on food and culture in different ways and then explode them out is something that’s pretty signature for us.

Tanya Bush: Yeah, and I think that is very much the case in terms of our audience as well. I think of Cake Zine as like a community of food lovers, but also not “foodies.” Like these are people, and we’re trying to foster a community of folks who are interested in food and pastry in the same breath as like film and art and fashion and culture and so it’s very interdisciplinary in its ethos, both in the print magazine and in the, IRL events that we throw.

And I think that it’s very much trying to bring more and more people into what we would historically have thought of as like the foodie community and broaden that out and expand it more robustly.

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“It’s easier to say what Cake Zine is not. It’s not a zine about cake. It’s a cultural exploration of the way that dessert interacts with society.”

— Aliza Abarbanel

Arjun Basu: Yeah. I want to talk about the community because it’s obvious, your events are big. So did it just come about because the first one was a launch event and it just kept going? It is a community now.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I think Tanya and I often say, or at least I feel that we didn’t create a community. We were already a part of one and we just created another opportunity for people to connect. And then over the course of Cake Zine, that community has continued to broaden and deepen as we’ve worked with more contributors and gone to more places and just expanded what we do.

Our first event, which was the launch party for Sexy Cake, we did at a bar called Honey’s here in Brooklyn that we love and we invited all of our friends, invited all the contributors, posted on Instagram, said that there would be cake from some bakers in the city that people, I think, were interested in seeing their cake or trying it in person, as opposed to just online because they were Instagram-popular bakers.

We had DJs and we actually didn’t have magazines because they didn’t arrive in time. So we had to rush-print seven copies in the city. And then we put them out on display. And of course people walked away with all of them. We didn’t actually get to sell any magazines, but we did have I think 300 people show up for that first party.

Tanya Bush: Yeah. And I think it does feel like we serendipitously happened into an exciting event model where we didn’t really expect that many people to show up. We wanted to bring this magazine that we’d spent the last six months working on in Google Docs to life and to celebrate it with all of the contributors who had made it so special.

There were a lot of lucky moments about it. Anna Williams, who’s an illustrator for the issue, is also a tattoo artist, and she happened to be in town, guest-tattooing from LA, and so we asked her if she’d be interested in doing “flash tattoos” inspired by the issue for the magazine, and that’s now become a staple at all of our parties and at parties more generally around Brooklyn is to have like flash tattoos and now every single launch event that we have, we sell out within the first 15 minutes.

We have folks queuing to get a fun little flash tattoo of a candy or a piece of cake. A “permanent party favor,” as we like to say, on their bodies. We hadn’t entirely conceptualized these events as this robust arm of the magazine, but to see the, sort of, excitement and appetite around it made us want to do it again and to celebrate with people we love.

Aliza Abarbanel: I would also say Tanya and I are social people. We love going to parties. We love thinking about what would be a really fun party to throw. Like we had Kat Wang and Yumiko Manarelli DJing at that first party because they’re friends of ours, and we love their music, and we thought it would be fun.

And then that’s become a cornerstone as well. So I think part of it is just already being a part of a food magazine and also just a personal community in the city, and then having free parties that people could just show up to and bring their friends to. We’ve now moved into a paid ticketing model just because we spend thousands of dollars on dessert that we give away at the parties but we were, you know, just giving it away just so that people would come into the space and hopefully leave with a magazine.

Arjun Basu: It feels like the timing is probably great because we’re coming out of the pandemic. But then you built it into something more, it just feels like a cultural movement in a way, because the magazine is not, like you said, it’s not a magazine about cake. It is neither cake nor zine. It’s almost like a hybrid literary magazine that just happens to have recipes. It’s like a literary publication or a cultural journal that has food as a starting point. How do you guys see it?

Tanya Bush: That definitely resonates. I think like one of the ways that we’re able to do that in an interesting and dynamic way is through these very narrow themes like Humble Pie, and Tough Cookie, and Candy Land because they’re pretty narrow, and we know the kinds of stories we’re interested in and then that feel like the right fit for the issue.

We can incorporate all different kinds of artists, and writers, and makers, whether that’s someone who’s worked in the restaurant industry their entire lives and just wants to try their hand at writing an essay for the first time, or a seasoned fiction writer, or a poet that we’ve admired for a long time.

We often try to bring all of these different voices together in conversation. And I think that’s one of the really special things about Cake Zine is that it is literary in its sensibility, but there’s also recipes that you can cook at home and that interact with or are inspired by the theme in really dynamic and engaging ways.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I think we certainly enjoy thinking of ourselves as a literary food magazine. I know for myself, when I was reading Bon Appetit and Tanya and I were talking about what Cake Zine could be, I was very interested in publishing things that I didn’t think would ever be published at a mainstream food magazine.

So I think coming down to publishing, fiction or poetry that just doesn’t normally find space at a major food mag. And I think food culture in America has been growing for a long period of time—but certainly like coming out of the pandemic, when a lot of people were baking at home more than they had previously or cooking at home or thinking about their relationships with the restaurants in their neighborhoods that were maybe having a harder time, it just felt a good opportunity to push what food culture could be.

Arjun Basu: So when you put together an issue, because you have, you have your call for open submissions and I’m sure you reach out to people as well, do you see, I don’t know how you would, but how does the issue come about? Do you see what you have and then you start creating a book or is there something in your head already beyond, Daily Bread or Candy Land or something like that?

Tanya Bush: We have a channel on our slack that’s called Good Ideas and we will often just throw these inchoate sort of half-baked thoughts that we are excited about when we come up with a theme into that chat. And that could be anything from, “We want a bagel union story,” or, “We really want a comic for this issue.”

Often there are certain beats that we might be interested in covering and we do publish a pretty robust pitch guide that often mentions specifically the kinds of stories we’re interested in publishing in the issue. But I think, like the pleasure of opening up to submissions is that we don’t really know what we’re going to get and I’m always wowed by the caliber and creativity of the kinds of pitches we’re receiving. They’re so often unexpected, and subversive, and dynamic, and things that we, as an editorial team, aren’t thinking of ourselves.

Arjun Basu: Are you looking at the names? Are you looking at the ideas? A combination of both? You’re magazine editors. You still want some big names in there.

Aliza Abarbanel: It’s an interesting time to ask us because tomorrow we’ll be meeting with our editorial board to go through the short list of pitches that we have assembled by going through all of the pitches. I would say we receive 400 per issue, which we publish maybe 20 to 25 stories because we’re a print magazine.

Some of those, if they don’t fit in the magazine, we’ll see if they want to run in the newsletter. Or because we’re food editors, maybe I’ll suggest it for another publication. But there always are just more good ideas that can fit in the magazine and the process of whittling it down for us, I think, comes down to just originality of the pitch, and who the writer is, and if they’re the right person to write that story. And that’s something that I think comes down to looking at clips, but also like life experience, like access that somebody might have to a community or an experience.

For example, for Candy Land, we were really interested in doing something about Hershey Park, or Cadbury Theme Park, and these, kind of, company towns that have flourished around candy factories around the world. And we received a couple pitches about that category. But one of them was from a writer, Maya Kosoff, who grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, worked at the theme park as a teenager, and then was revisiting the labor- and class-dynamics of that town as an adult.

So I think that was a perfect example. We were interested in a topic we’re interested in, but then somebody who had a specific experience that really lent itself to that. And we also solicit from people in our professional and like personal networks, whether it’s like a big cookbook author or a novelist, because we do, of course, have our own favorite readers and writers that we would love to publish in the magazine.

“I was very interested in publishing things that I didn’t think would ever be published at a mainstream food magazine.”

— Aliza Abarbanel

Arjun Basu: In terms of this whole ecosystem that you have, the magazine feels like it’s at the center of things, then you have the substack, which has stuff from the magazine, but also other stuff. And then you have your events too, which create their own content in their own way. So what is the heart of the ecosystem?

Tanya Bush: I think, Aliza, I’m curious what you would say, but I think the magazine is like the cornerstone and indelible core of what we do. I think the events for us are either celebrations of a new release, or a way to get into community and conversation with bakers or folks that we’ve worked with, or showcase parts of the magazine and a reading and then the newsletter, I think, is very much sort of a way to stay in dialogue with our readers and community and let them know about what Cake Zine’s been up to and if they want to like submit to us or if they want to buy a t-shirt.

And so I think that we spend an inordinate and probably inadvisable amount of time making this magazine, which is not making us much money at all. And we’re very precious about the physical object itself, it goes without saying, but sorry, it goes without saying, but we are a print only magazine.

And not all of our content is published online. So I think it’s very important for us to showcase the magazine and everything that we do. It’s the reason that we love to do this. It’s for both, I think me and Aliza, what we love most about building a brand, which is part of what it means to build a magazine. We are in QuickBooks and paying sales tax, and figuring out things like production, and distribution, and printing costs, and all of those things.

But at the end of the day what I find, personally, most vitally enlivening is getting to work with and collaborate with writers and folks in our community who we admire and expand that community. So I would say the magazine is our core for sure.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I would agree. I would say the magazine is the core of what Cake Zine is, and then the other arms are what allow us to do that. I think it’s fun for us to be able to share more casual updates or sometimes there’s a quick thing that one of us wants to write that we want to dedicate space to.

I think also just from a financial perspective sometimes we work with brands that are maybe less interested in having a print ad compared to something that’s on social or on the newsletter. And I think that even in talking about the early success of our parties and our ability, we sold 750 tickets to our most recent launch party in New York, and we wouldn’t be able to do that without social media.

So seeing it both as an opportunity to share different kinds of content in different ways with different audiences, and also knowing that for an indie publication we need to be able to connect with people so they can find us and show up with us. And that’s what allows us to do that.

Arjun Basu: Events, if they’re done properly, it can be really lucrative for a media brand. When I was running media brands a long time ago now we just keyed into the events because advertising, you can sell as much advertising as you want. And we all know printing a magazine is expensive. Distributing a magazine is expensive. But the events, you tour, whatever, you go to your readers as opposed to them coming to you. And one, you build loyalty, but two, if you do it properly, you can make a whole lot of money on it. And your events are, sort of, a movement. It’s a tribe almost now. That could be really lucrative—that could support everything else.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I would say we still are very reluctant to charge probably as much as we should be for the events. Our tickets are typically $15. They include whatever dessert we’re giving away. And then we have liquor sponsors or other brands that are helping offset that cost.

And I think certainly a lot of financial advisors or people we’ve talked to would say, you should up your ticket price, but we want people to come and buy the magazine, and buy drinks, and do other things. And we want it to feel easy to be able to want to come to a Cake Zine thing. So I think that’s part of our business growth as well as being able to charge more fairly for things, but also feel like there’s different access points for what we do.

Arjun Basu: Have you had events outside of New York?

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, we did LA. We did two seatings, like a dinner, at Quarter Sheets, which is a great pizza and cake restaurant. We did one event in Paris last summer, which is where our art director, Noah, is based. And then we did two events in London last December. And then this year we’re gearing up to do an event in Philadelphia next month.

Arjun Basu: And how did the events in LA and Europe go?

Aliza Abarbanel: So fun.

Tanya Bush: Yeah, really well. We were really excited to see that there was enthusiasm in different cities, because, as much as we are a New York-based publication, I think we very much try and expand our reach beyond New York City. We’re distributed by Antenne in Europe. And it was cool to see that folks across the pond are reading and engaging with Cake Zine.

Aliza Abarbanel: I would say our events outside of New York are definitely more casual in terms of their scale and level of programming. Like in Paris and London, we did a kind of pop up model at two different wine bars. Or, I guess Oranj is a wine bar in London, and then Cadet, which is a cocktail bar in Paris. And at both of those, we brought in three bakers in London and two bakers in Paris whose work we admire to make food that was inspired by the issue. And we had magazines and that was like people could come through and hang out, which is definitely more casual compared to the level of programming that we do at New York events.

And, obviously, the level of attendees was smaller as well, but still I would say probably like around 100 people at both of those. And then we also did a gallery reading and conversation at Maximilian William in London tied to an installation we did in this space that displays programming like printed materials and then things inspired by it. So that was fun for us to play with the format as well.

Arjun Basu: So I guess that leads to what comes next in terms of, do you guys have plans for world nomination?

Aliza Abarbanel: Hopefully not, but we definitely want to keep making magazines. Right now we’re working on “Daily Bread” which is going to be our sixth issue, which will be coming out in early 2025. We’ve been doing two issues a year for, this is our third year. But just coming up around the holidays and our own schedules, we decided to hold it a little bit and release it in the new year. But we’re really excited about the issue. Tanya, do we want to mention any themes in it, or is it too early?

Tanya Bush: We could give maybe a little taste. I’ll mention one story that I’m particularly excited about by Jordan Kisner, who’s an essayist and New York Times Magazine contributor. I’ve admired her for a long time. She wrote this book called Thin Places. But she has been wanting to write about this Catholic church upstate that had this incredible drama where people were leaving the church and fighting with the bishop over whether the communion host could be gluten free. And the official line from the Pope is that the Body of Christ—it has gluten, contains gluten. Anything gluten-free is not Jesus. And that feels like just such a perfect, delightful, funny, strange encapsulation of the theme. It’s a story that just fits so perfectly into Daily Bread and also introduces a lot of really interesting questions around the sacrament and what constitutes the body of Jesus. So that’s what I’m really excited about.

Arjun Basu: Jesus is not gluten-free!

Aliza Abarbanel: Tanya and I are both Jewish. Members of our editorial board are not, but I do think it’s funny that, obviously, the theme of Daily Bread comes from the Lord’s Prayer, and so we received a lot of Jesus pitches. But I wouldn’t say we’re especially interested in Jesus, but more of what Jesus can represent in terms of how it impacts things.

I’ll mention another story that I’m excited about in the issue, which is going to be written by Michael Denzel Smith, who is a great writer in New York as well, which is about the rise and fall of cutting your crusts off of bread. So talking about how, in the Victorian era, like tea sandwiches, cutting the crust off of bread was at the height of fashion, and what it means to be refined. Coming into this current era where having, like, a Bien Cuit sourdough sandwich, crusty bread is quite prized, and an uncrustable is, like, for kids on the playground."

So I think we really delight in historical criticism and contextualization and being able to think about the symbolism of cutting crusts off bread, I think is fun to be thinking about as well.

Arjun Basu: I come from a very pro-crust baking environment.

Tanya Bush: We are too, I would say.

“We talk about the idea of, like, a wine bar / bookstore / dessert bar brick-and-mortar in New York. That could be something really exciting.”

— Tanya Bush

Arjun Basu: Just to make that official—we’ve had some real declarations here. One, Jesus isn’t gluten free. And two, I am pro-crust.

Aliza Abarbanel: We also are planning a reading, tied to our issue, Candy Land, here in New York in early October, tied to an exhibition that they’re doing called, “Yes, Chef!” that’s exploring food and power, at Water Street Projects, which is their gallery. And we’re going to bring together six contributors, five or six, from Candy Land to read their pieces from the issue and celebrate it as well.

Readings are something that has been a newer addition to our events landscape. We did a reading for our magazine’s second birthday. We did, like, a kid’s second birthday party basically in April of this year which I think was really special for us to get to share the magazine in a context where people can actually sit down with a slice of cake and listen and have it be a little bit more calm than some of our launch parties. So we’re excited to do this fall reading as well.

Arjun Basu: So what would you like this to become?

Tanya Bush: The eternal question.

Aliza Abarbanel: Tanya asks me this like once a month, maybe, “What’s our North Star?”

Tanya Bush: We are still in the shaping phase and that continues to shift. Some of our shorter-term goals are ensuring that this is a sustainable business and paying all of our contributors fairly, paying ourselves fairly for the labor that we’re all putting in. We all work many other jobs in order to pay the rent.

So Cake Zine isn’t exactly doing that for us yet. So that’s definitely a top of mind goal. Of course, we also talk about the idea of, like, a wine bar/bookstore/dessert bar brick-and-mortar in New York. And I think that, in a few years, that could be something really exciting.

We work with an incredible number of producers for the parties who are very much ensconced in the restaurant industry space in New York. And it would be such a delight to continue to work with them in a new format. And I think that a, sort of, interdisciplinary physical space would be really exciting to us.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, I would say that’s very much inspired by Noble Rot in London, which is a great natural wine magazine, obviously, that has a couple of wine bars in London now, because Tanya is a pastry chef here in New York at Little Egg. Her cruller was dubbed New York mag’s pastry of the year last year, and I’m going to say that because she didn’t.

But her pastries are exceptional, and I think we see this real community around Cake Zine, and that it would be really fun to have a permanent place where people could gather and read our magazines, read other magazines, have wine and cake. Maybe there’s like a secret room in the back for dancing later on at night.

But I would say until then, we just want to keep making really beautiful and high-quality magazines that kind of push what Cake Zine means. I think it’s exciting that we don’t have to do cake. We don’t have to do one format. We could just keep on expanding and trust that we have a team of people and also an audience that will go on that journey with us. And I think certainly growing the business to make it financially sustainable for everyone involved is a big part of it.

Arjun Basu: That secret room could be a “cake-easy.” As opposed to a speakeasy.

Tanya Bush: Wow. I think you named it, maybe.

Arjun Basu: I’ll expect an invitation for when it opens because I do see brick-and-mortar. I do see this. There’s such a unique thing. Readings, in general, are boring. I’m a novelist, so I know that, and my publisher, I have a book coming out next month, and my publisher is trying to figure out what to do with me because I told them I really don’t want to do anything on stage. Because they’re generally boring. But if there was cake and wine at them, then, that changes the dynamic of it completely. And the other thing about readings is they’re very self-important. So anything that knocks them down a peg and becomes part of a larger event is cool. And so if you had this, I see it. And you have a name for it already, obviously, and it would be easy to build in a few places.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, we call it the “kindergarten school of readings,” which is if you give people a drink and a snack, they’re very happy to sit quietly.

Arjun Basu: Until they’ve had too much cake.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, everyone runs around the room.

Arjun Basu: It’s almost the same question: What other projects can you do with this? You have the makings of a solid media ecosystem and now it’s just consolidating and making it richer.

Aliza Abarbanel: I think that question hits on our best and worst impulses because we always want to do more things. I do a podcast, This is Taste. So we’ve talked about doing a Cake Zine podcast before because that’s in my wheelhouse. Tanya has just finished writing her first book. She already wants to write a second book, which is crazy. Like a Cake Zine book. Video, I think, is a format. It’s interesting to us.

I think there’s always this potential to do something more, but I think my goal for us this year is, to quote Buckminster Fuller, “Do more with less,” and like really shore up the things that are core to us and how we can be monetizing them and simplifying them and just making the magazine run as smoothly as it can, so that when we get excited about something new and want to add it in, we don’t have this question of like, “Where is the time or the budget to make it happen?” We have the space for it.

Arjun Basu: I’m happy to hear that actually. That you guys are doing what you can, because one of the questions I would ask when I was an editor is not. “Should we do it?” but, “Can we?” And when I said, “Can we?” I didn’t mean if it was too hard. I was like, “Ce physically do this? Are we doing enough already? And who’s going to do it?” And I think that’s a really important question to ask. And I’m happy to hear that you guys are asking it already because there’s so much potential in what you’re doing.

Aliza Abarbanel: Yeah, we want to do a cake mix. Like everything we want to do is just do we have time?

Arjun Basu: You’ve landed on a really great vehicle, I think. But if you drive it too fast, you’re going to crash.

Tanya Bush: Yeah, exactly. We’ve grown really fast in the past couple of years and we’re just slow and steady, keep putting a lot of care and attention into what we love doing and seeing where that takes us.

Aliza Abarbanel: I’m gonna say somehow it doesn’t feel slow and steady. It takes four months, four and a half months, probably, to make a magazine from the pitch call going out to sending it to the printer. And then that doesn’t really give us a lot of time before we start the next one. And certainly when you add in multiple events per issue, shirts, all these other things, I do think we’re, we go pretty fast.

But we didn’t intend to start a magazine at all.We really wanted to just make two issues of something and then move on. So I think once we realized that we actually had something bigger, there’s been more of an inclination to be more strategic because it’s something that we want to be doing in another three years. And after that as well.

Arjun Basu: What has surprised you the most by being magazine publishers?

Aliza Abarbanel: Like all of the logistics, I would say. When I worked at Condé, we had a whole department that would handle shipping, and distribution, and stockists, and all of those things. And I think after we did the first issue, we realized we were like, “We did it. It’s done.” And then actually we had to get it into people’s hands and pay tax on it.

We work with Antenne for our UK and EU distribution, but we do all of our domestic stockists ourselves. We work with a great woman named Amber Lee who does that for us, but we didn’t start working with her right away. So I think for me, at least the whole second part of the job, once the magazine is done, was definitely the biggest surprise.

Tanya Bush: Yeah. Pretty similar. I, especially not coming from a traditional media background, didn’t really conceive of what it meant to make a magazine. And as Aliza said, we weren’t exactly aiming to make a magazine. So we had to build the plane as we were flying it, so to speak.

And I think that thinking about sort of division of time and allocation of labor and how much time we’re actually spending on the making of the magazine itself, and the editing, and the talking with various illustrators versus the amount of time that we’re spending in the back end of Shopify, and building out newsletters, and going through like sheets and sheets of Excel spreadsheets was totally a surprise to me.

And I think that it makes the time that we get to spend on things like the actual editorial process sweeter and more exciting because that’s what reminds us why we’re doing it in the first place.

Arjun Basu: Okay. So for each of you, I’m going to ask this question. What are three magazines or media that really. Excites you right now.

Aliza Abarbanel: Tanya and I are very good friends and also business partners and so I feel like there will be overlap, but I’ll say Acacia Magazine, which is a new political Muslim leftist magazine that launched here in New York earlier in the year. My friend, Arsh, is the art director for it, and I think that they just do incredible work.

One of our favorites, which is Vittles, is a UK based food newsletter that I think really pushes the boundaries of traditional or untraditional food reporting. We admire them a lot.

A third one, I will say, Apartamento, we talk about all the time as just as the standard of an indie publication that has really created longevity in an ecosystem around the brand.

Tanya Bush: Those are good ones. Of course, I was going to say Vittles. Okay, so I’ll swerve to other online publications. I’m thinking a lot about Substack, obviously. And in the context of like the baking community, I really love Kassie Mendieta’s Substack. She has a Substack called IBakeMistakes. And she is very interested in experimentation and play in the context of baking. And she writes about technique and provides really interesting base recipes. And this is something I think a lot about in the context of my own baking and my own book writing. I’ve really admired what she’s been doing. And it’s just super cool.

Another one would be Dirt. They publish a bunch of pop-cultural content on their website, which is also a newsletter. They’ve got book reviews and personal essays. They just published a great piece about the Anthony Bourdain biopic that’s forthcoming with A24. And we are actually doing a collaboration with them in October—a week of different pieces that we’re soliciting together about dessert after dark. Daisy is just an incredible founder. I take a lot of inspiration from her business model and the way that she approaches non-traditional media. And I think that all of the content on their website is really thoughtful and invigorating.

And then, what would be last? I guess all of these are like online publications. I do read print magazines, but I do really look forward to Emily Sundberg’s newsletter in my inbox every morning, she writes a substack called feed me. And one of the things I find specifically interesting is this guest lecture series that she does, which is interviewing different founders about the state of the industry that they’re working in and how they’re approaching their businesses. And I think it’s very useful just as we continue to think about growing and scaling Cake Zine to read from and think critically about how other founders are doing the same.

Aliza Abarbanel: I’ll just say one more that we share, which is The Drift, which is also an indie magazine based here in New York, a leftist, like political-thought magazine. I think their work is just really high quality. And we both really admire the way that they have developed the business into something that seems like it will be around and something people are talking about for a long time.