Welcome to Candy Land
Orders for our new summer issue are live now.
Cake Zine Friends,
The past six months have all been leading up to this. Our new summer issue, Candy Land, is available for orders now. Copies will ship out in early July, and we’ll be celebrating the issue with a NYC launch party on July 18 (more info soon). In the meantime, the best way to support our independent work is to order a copy and share widely. We think you’ll enjoy it.
Candy is often imagined as dessert in its most unnatural form, engineered from molten rivers of sugar on ever-churning assembly lines. But even the most artificial sweet is innately tied to the earth: A cacao tree deep in the Amazon, ripening with fruit. A field where sugarcane sways. A mine where petroleum is extracted from the earth to be turned into brightly colored dyes.
A land made of candy is a classic utopian image in our cultural imagination, like Harry McClintock’s 1928 folk song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” an anticapitalist “hobo’s paradise” with lemonade springs, whiskey lakes, cigarette trees, and no work. A candy land is a fantasy, the stuff of children’s board games and pop princess music videos. But candy cannot exist without the earth, and our hunger for sweetness has left an indelible mark on the land: The violent history of sugar and fruit production, empires of candy and the company towns that have crystallized around them.
Cake Zine’s fifth issue returns candy to its natural roots. Candy Land is full of essays, recipes, fiction, and art that unwrap candy’s connections to the literal and metaphorical land. How do artificial flavors prime our palates? How is farming for sweetness shifting in a warming world? We also widen the implications of “candy” and “land” to include borders, culture, and inedible but thematic additions, like plastic raver beads and a certain titular board game.
Home bakers regularly dabble in making confections like cake, pies, and cookies, but candy is typically reserved for those with grand ambitions (or, at least, a kitchen stocked with a thermometer). Rather than pulling taffy at home, we offer a handful of recipes that keep candy closer to its organic roots, or that use packaged candy as an ingredient.
Candy Land is all around us, in Pacific Northwest dumpsters and Taiwanese night markets, board game nights and schoolyard fights, at corporate amusement parks and within the soil itself. When the rest of our desserts eventually go stale, candy will remain eternal, long after the earth it came from has changed forever.
Always save room for dessert,
Aliza Abarbanel, Tanya Bush, and Noah Emrich
Bake: Thai milk tea burnt Basque cheesecake from Elisa Sunda aka @saltedrye.
Make: A DIY zine template from the great folks over at Gasp Zine. If you’re in LA, check out their gallery event this Saturday!
Do: A summer fieldguide workshop aimed at sparking play and creativity from contributor Annika Hansteen-Izora.
Watch: An LA screening of Gaza Mon Amour on 7/31, hosted by our buddy Laith Zuaiter’s film series The Friendly Strangers, benefiting families who need evacuation from Gaza.
Subscribe: Sophia June and Layla Halabian, formerly of Nylon, are launching a substack about books you actually want to read. We’re excited for what’s to come.
Visit: Live in the NYC area? Take a trip to the Fairfield Art Museum to catch a solo show by the pop candy artist Peter Anton, whose work we recently featured on IG. More candy content to come…
Recipes for dirt ‘n’ worms tiramisu, sweet and surreal fiction, plus a timeline of the board game Candy Land? I'm so in.
The Thai milk tea burnt basque cake??? Omg????