Call for Pitches: Forbidden Fruit

Volume 7 is open for submissions.

Hi Cake Zine friends,

We’re thrilled to announce an open pitch call for Forbidden Fruit, Cake Zine’s seventh issue. This time, we’re diving into temptation and transgression through the lens of fruit. We’re looking for pitches on secrets, contraband, vice, and indulgence—if it’s irresistible, illicit, or intoxicating, we want to hear about it.

Cake Zine publishes a wide array of content, from recipes to fiction, and accepts portfolios from visual artists interested in being paired with written content. Successful submissions will have a clear but creative connection to fruit, whether literal (fresh from the vine, smuggled across borders, transformed in a dessert) or more metaphorical (the fruits of labor, knowledge, queerness, or desire). Ideally, even figurative connections will include some actual fruit—but if your idea is compelling enough, we’ll consider it. Think:

• Unholy marriages of vice and sweetness, like apple moonshine or mango-flavored vapes.

• Contemporary retellings of fruit’s sensual and sinister symbolism: Eve’s apple, Persephone’s pomegranate, Elio’s peach.

• The teenage yearning to wear Juicy Couture or Apple Bottom jeans.

• Petty and less-petty crimes, like stealing vast quantities of strawberry milkshakes from your job at Dairy Queen or pilfering a prized family recipe to share with our readers.

• Confessions of amateur (or professional) fruit smugglers, from clandestine mango imports to the U.S. in the 19th-century or sneaking durian home on public transportation in Singapore.

• The fantasies and cravings of the allergy-prone (does oat milk ice cream taste as sweet?).

• A tell-all of working at Apple’s Genius bar.

• An oral history of the dessert rotation at the Lavender Hill commune.

Please see this pitch guide for more ideas to get you started, detailed information on rates, what to include in your submission, and the types of content we are interested in. Pitches for written content are due at 9 a.m. EST on March 24th, and Visual Pitches at 9 a.m. EST on April, 1st, but we will gladly accept submissions prior to the deadline.

---

Listen: We’re on the TASTE podcast talking about the editorial process behind Daily Bread and the many cultural meanings baked into bread.

Apply: Vittles and the British Library Food Season have teamed up to create a food writing fellowship, awarded to a writer who needs to use the Library's unique food collections to inform a piece of writing on an aspect of contemporary food or drink culture. Entries are due March 25.

Read: About how pastry chefs are incorporating bread into dessert in increasingly innovative ways by Tanya Bush. We’re not the only ones obsessed with bread.

Participate: In a short survey for a thesis study at Parsons School of Design examining how gastronomy intersects with linguistic expression.