329: Cake Zine: Tough Cookie

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Cookie is such a broad term, but again, I think it just totally depends on mood. Sometimes I want a hefty, Levain-style cross between a muffin and a cookie, and then sometimes I want something that's more refined, that feels like a sable, or something that's just more restaurant-style. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Cake Scene is an independent print magazine exploring society through sweets launched by Tanya Bush and me, Eliza Abarbanel. Our fourth volume, Tough Cookie, presents a hearty batch of trials and triumphs, all in the context of cookies. It's a winter issue that presents recipes difficult in doing and in chewing, but also tales of hungry sharks, aliens, and the pitfalls of viral dessert fame. Today on the show, we dig into everything inside the issue and how we made it happen, plus our recent trip to London and more. I hope you enjoy.

1:38Tanya Bush, this is Taste. We are Cake Scene. This is the collab episode of my dreams. I'm so honored to be here. Tanya, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast, not just because Tough Cookie, which is our new issue, is my favorite issue of Cakesian so far, but also because we met because of a cookie. We did. A strawberries and cream cookie, right? Yeah. Tanya made the strawberries and cream cookie. Was it for a bake sale? Yeah, it was for like a, it wasn't really a bake sale. I was basically just giving the cookies away for free in the park. It was like deep pandemic days and I was trying to like meet new people and I was baking a ton and I just had so much inventory in my house that I couldn't possibly finish myself.

2:15So I was just trying to sort of meet new people. And I said into Eliza's DMs. And she said, hey, I have a strawberries and cream cookie for you. And I think we live in the same neighborhood. Would you want to get coffee? Which sounds really sketchy. It really does. And also I was anonymous at the time, right? Yeah. Tanya had no photos of herself on her Instagram. It was just photos of baked goods. And I remember I was just like leaving the apartment and my friend was like, wait, who are you going to meet? And I was like, honestly, I don't know. I'm just going to like look for somebody holding cookies and see what happens.

2:49And not only was the cookie delicious, but like we set off a beautiful friendship and collaborative partnership. We did. And also it was very brave of you to meet me. Okay. Well, really it was the strawberries and cream cookie concept that lured me. Also, it was, you know, early pandemic. I was bored. I had not a lot of things to do. What is a strawberries and cream cookie? How did you actually make it? Yeah. So it's made with freeze dried strawberries that you like pulverize essentially. And then it's a pretty like traditional like sugar cookie base with egg yolk um i believe a little bit of brown butter and then just like a really nice sort of like white chocolate that's like cut into shards melted a little bit on the top and then a bunch of malden um and it's like this sort of shockingly pink color and it just like has all of the all of the flavors one might find in like a strawberry milkshake it's very very like wholesome and and pleasurable so i have to ask because i don't know if I've ever asked you this and now I have like the infrastructure of being on the mic.

3:45Why did you ask me? Why did I ask you? Yeah. Why were you like, hey, come here. Did you ask other people? Oh, my God. This is a really good question. I wish I were like nervous. I don't think so. I think I had a sense that we would get along. I knew we were in the same neighborhood. I think also, honestly, like it was that moment in the pandemic where I was like, I really need to like meet new people. Like my, I had moved to the city only like a year beforehand and was sort of like hungry for like new relationships. And I had maybe some sort of, yeah, subliminal sense, call it fate, but had a feeling that we would get along.

4:25And so I just sort of sent a message and hoped for the best. And then, you know, we met and it was like, we couldn't stop talking. And I, and I sort of knew. We couldn't stop talking. And now we can talk a lot more, not just about the strawberries and cream cookie, but all of the cookies in this issue, which there are so many good ones. So many cookies. We just were in London, which was so much fun. It was so much fun. Got back on Saturday night. We had two different events, one at Orange and then one at Maximilian William, which is a really cool gallery. And we got to see Eliza do a live podcast moment, which was very fun.

4:58Yeah, except for it wasn't recorded. So it's just like a live conversation, but I did use my podcast motivation and like state of mind, especially because we got like stuck on the subway coming there, which was stressful. That was a very stressful moment, I have to say. So moving out of stress into the highlights, I'm curious, like coming out of London, like what was your experience like for you? What were your favorite things that we ate? That's such a good question. Okay, well, it was really fun to eat the creme brulee cookie from the issue. So Chloe Rose Crabtree, who's the pastry chef at Bake Street London, has a recipe in the new issue, Tough Cookie, that's about this creme brulee cookie that has gone viral and is like a major draw for this bakery in London.

5:40There's this like crazy article about a woman who reset her Tinder radius so that she would only match with people who lived within walking distance of the bakery because she lives far away and she wanted her morning after to always start with one of those cookies. Chloe Rose writes in the head note about how they've been called Stalinists for enforcing cookie limits, which is wild to me that they only allow people to have one or two cookies a day because they'll sell out so quickly and they're so laborious to create. It's like a three-day process to make this cookie. Yeah, I think four actually.

6:10Well, we have the recipe. So if anyone is interested in attempting it and being a tough cookie, that is one thing. But we also had the cookies available at our party at Orange, which was really exciting for everyone. Yeah. And it was really fun to just watch her live brulee it and then get to eat it like piping hot and fresh. And like, it really just tastes like the perfect platonic ideal of creme brulee and a like beautiful sugar cookie married together. So that was super fun. I also went to Lyle's and the pastry chef, Claudia, came to our party at Orange and had invited me to come. And I had one of the best desserts I've had in a really long time.

6:45It was this really like silky pumpkin ice cream with Buddha's hand and this like gorgeous pumpkin seed oil and salt. And it was just like that perfect balance between savory and sweet and like fresh and punchy and all of the sort of textures and flavors. So that was really fun. And Tanya is an ice cream fanatic. So when you really like an ice cream, I feel like that says a lot about it. Yeah, I love ice cream. It's probably like my dessert of choice always. And I grew up making ice cream. So hers was really perfect. And she said that it was very laborious that they like cook down the pumpkin for like 12 hours.

7:17And, And, you know, it was like just this the perfect temperature. It was like silky smooth, not too cold. So it's like hurting your teeth, but like still sort of like somewhere between like a mousse and like a frozen dessert. It was really beautiful. Yeah, I wish I had tried that. I also want to shout out the salted duck egg yolk cookie that we had at our event at Orange that the pop up see you soon, which is doing a residency at Orange, did for us for the party, which was just super salty, obviously, and rich and almost like eating a mooncake. I think was my closest experience. And also just watching the three chefs, like they have such a fun collaborative communal dynamic.

7:55It really reminded me of like watching us or other people that are collaborators, but also friends. It was very like soul warming for me. It really was. And also all of their food was just so phenomenal. Like they had a tonka bean semifredo that I loved, the filet of fish with XO sauce. I will never forget. The filet XO fish as it's called, which I have, I got the shirts. What? Yeah, I have one for you. They have little merch for the shirts. And the whole idea behind this is that literally one of the chefs was going through the drive through at McDonald's, had a vat of XO sauce in the front seat with him, and then put it on the filet of fish in the moment.

8:28And then they took that to make this other version. I think sometimes people doing chef-y versions of fast food, it can come across kind of weird. But I think in this moment, it truly was just as greasy and delicious, but also so much thought and care had gone into it. It was a really fun combination. Yeah, it was the best filet of fish I've ever had. What about you? What was your favorite meal? I liked all of those. You know, I'll do a whole rundown with Matt, so I don't want to get us too far afield into savory territory. But I will say that the night after our event at Maximilian William, I went to Tamil Prince and ate basically everything on the menu.

9:00And they have a whole window into the kitchen where you can see three guys who are basically making roti the entire night. That's their like only job. And it was just a really exceptional meal. And I think one of the fun things about going to London is really like digging into the South Asian food scene there because it is so delicious and developed. And so that was a highlight for me too. Cool. So we have to go back to London. We really do. We were only there for like five days, six days. But we did a lot. Okay. So we were there not to eat filet exo fish alone, but to be promoting the magazine.

9:29And I want to just take a step back and say, tough cookie, like how did we land here on this theme? Do you remember when we said it? Yeah, I think it was when we decided to sort of move out of cake entirely. we thought about a year that we were dedicating to idiom. So we first went into humble pie, which I think was honestly your idea initially, right? Who could say, honestly?

9:54You know, tough cookie felt like the perfect sort of twin for humble pie. And, you know, it's like sort of this like nostalgic term to me, like a tough cookie is like obstinate and gritty, but it also like is resilient and it can sort of hold a lot and it's both really narrow and expansive at the same time. And so I think we were like, okay, we've already moved beyond cake and the pastry case. What other desserts are available to us and cookie and toughness felt like the perfect way in. I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, I also come from this food media background where to me, winter is always cookie season.

10:31The cookie issue at Bon Appetit when I worked there and certainly at like every food publication is a marquee moment. And And so I think knowing we wanted to do a kind of end of year, like loosely holiday issue, like it had to be the cookie issue. I also think we both just really love cookies and who does not really. Totally. Yeah. And I feel like every culture has its cookie and like everyone has like memories tied to and in conversation with cookies. And so like it felt like just such a perfect sort of way forward for the magazine. Definitely. And I think that when we got a lot of pitches, it was really fun to see the kind of breadth of options that were available to us.

11:07I want to dig into the kind of pieces that made it into the magazine. But first, I'm wondering, like as a pastry chef, even, and also as a writer, like do cookies occupy a different place in terms of how we think about desserts compared to pie or cake for you? I like that question. I think like cookies to me feel more accessible than a cake. Cake is like something that is like, you know, really like celebratory and like higher commitment to make, I think. And like, you know, you have to slice into a cake in order to eat it. You know, a cookie is like something that you can have like one of or two of or three of and go back.

11:43And it feels sort of more like snack like to me in the popular imagination than cake, whereas cake has this sort of like, yeah, feeling of like celebration and cookies feel a little bit like more like casual and approachable for like, you know, people who haven't baked as much. I think that's right. And I think we can't talk about this without talking about the proliferation of frozen cookie dough and how easy it is to buy a tub of actually good cookie dough and bake it off. Or if you're me or like any teenager in America, eat it raw. You know, I think like there's this kind of you're only 20 minutes away from a cookie at any point in time.

12:19Yeah, it's so true. Yeah. I was always eating like the Toll House cookie dough when I was in high school, like getting high and sneaking it from the freezer. As one does. And did you know that the Toll House cookie, chocolate chip cookie recipe is the original chocolate chip cookie recipe? No. What do you mean? I found this out and I have been hiding this information to share it with you. There's this amazing article that I read that's about how this woman, Ruth Wakefield, who ran the Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts from 1930 to 1967, originated this recipe, the Toll House chocolate crunch cookie at the restaurant.

12:54And that is in terms of like credited chocolate chip cookie recipes in existence, the first chocolate chip cookie recipe. Okay. That's very interesting. I feel like in the popular lore, I like once upon a time read that like someone was trying to make a chocolate cookie and then just like broke up shards of chocolate and thought that they were going to melt and like create a chocolate, like a homogenous chocolate cookie. But that was sort of the beginning or impetus of a chocolate chip cookie. I think there's a lot of lore because one of the lore surrounding this is that chocolate chips like accidentally fell into the batter, which I think Ruth found very offensive, as would most pastry chefs, that you just wouldn't have your kitchen in order in that kind of way.

13:31I think it was intentional. And then what actually happened is that this woman, Marjorie Husted, who was the voice of Betty Crocker on the Betty Crocker radio show, kind of popularized this recipe for people. And then during the war era, people would start sending chocolate chip cookies abroad to army people. And that is where this like idea of like the home baked chocolate chip cookie came from, at least in like the American parlance. That's so interesting. I honestly haven't had a Torhouse cookie in a long time. Have you? No, but after this, like I might just go buy some cookie dough and eat it on the sidewalk.

14:04It's a date. I'd love to join. I want to read you just a quote from this article because I found it really interesting just in terms of thinking about how we think about cookies. So it says, in a single inexpensive handheld serving, it contained the very richness and comfort that millions of people were forced to live without in the late 1930s. Ingesting a warm chocolate chip cookie offered the eaters a brief respite from their quotidian woe. That's poetic. I know. I didn't write it, but it is poetic. And I think it does speak to this idea of the fact that you can have just one of a cookie and that you can freeze the rest or you can buy one at a discounted price.

14:38and also kind of like the toughness that went into the making of chocolate chip cookies in the first place, which to me, I think are probably the most iconic cookie in general. Yeah, they totally are. So we do have a chocolate chip cookie in the issue, but we also have a lot of different kinds of cookies as well. I'm wondering if you have any like favorite recipes in the issue or ones that you found like most interesting as an editor. I was really excited to get Brianna Holt's chocolate cornmeal fennel cookie in. She is a baker who I've admired for a long time. She's a pastry chef. Yeah. She's the pastry chef at a tandem in Portland and Portland, Maine, Portland, Maine.

15:15Right. There are two Portlands. And she makes these like iconic biscuits that I'd coveted the recipe for for a long time and then was able to purchase during the pandemic. And yeah, I was really excited to get to work with her. And I think that this cookie is a tough sell. That was sort of like the hook for her that like she has always loved fennel and it gives at this sort of like minty, like sort of floral finish and that like it's not something that was flying off the shelves in the same way that, you know, quote, the party curls did, the chocolate chunks, the, you know, spicy ginger molasses cookies.

15:49And so, you know, I was really excited to get this recipe just because I really wanted to eat it. And I'd been like admiring it online before, but also because I think Brianna has such a like distinctive voice, like writerly voice. And when the head note first came in, I was sort of floored. I was like, Like this is really like dynamic and singular and vivid and really interesting and like very much sort of like proves the concept of I think a lot of what Kaseen is trying to do, which is to give, you know, folks in kitchens the opportunity to like reflect on and think more broadly about their food in more literary ways.

16:22And she did that so like beautifully. And the cookies are really fucking good. I agree. And I also think like I've been in other editorial rooms before where the concept of a recipe being a fit for something because nobody wants to order it would not fly. Like that's a kind of it's a literally difficult sell. But I think we trust her as a baker. And we also kind of trust our audience that if someone that is respected, like whose work they admire is saying something is good and that you should give it a shot, even though it doesn't necessarily have the glossy sheen of another cookie that like that actually does fit, especially in the context of a tough cookie.

16:56Yeah, totally. And obviously, Abby Balanguit makes that cookie look really, really good. Yeah, Abby, who is the author of the wonderful Filipino dessert cookbook Mayumu, who also contributed a recipe for this issue, which is a guava hard candy stained glass cookie, was one of the models that we brought in for the photo shoot, which this is the first time we've ever shot food in the context of people, which also I think speaks to the fact that you can eat just one cookie as opposed to like we couldn't shoot someone taking a bite into an entire cake. That's so true. We could have tried, though. We could have tried.

17:29But I think this was the right moment. And I think that Abby's cookies are really fun for the issue because she has you pulverize these guava hard candies that you often would get like with the Czech when you're like eating somewhere in Chinatown. And then you melt them into these stained glass cookies where it's two cookies lured together. Right. And that's how you get this kind of beautiful effect that almost looks like a Christmas ornament. Would you say that's your favorite cookie of the issue? Yeah, I really like sour things. And I think having a sour cookie is pretty unusual. So I like the fact that the hard candy is kind of leaning into that.

18:02And then she also has the salted plum powder kind of star dusted on top. So it's a beautiful cookie. And it also is kind of an unusually eaten cookie compared to a lot of other ones. Yeah, it's like Disco Technicolor. It's so vivid and fun to look at. Disco cookie is a really... Disco cookie. That should have been our theme. Shit, can we go back? We do. We could go back. Okay, so these are some of the recipes in the issue. I want to talk about some of the pieces that are in it because I think what's so fun with Cake Scene, especially with this issue, is the variety of content that can kind of fit under this seemingly niche theme.

18:36So I'm wondering, as an editor, were there any kind of like pet stories that you worked on or really kind of wanted to see through? Obviously, we love everything, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love all our children equally. I think, well, so we have the most fiction that we've ever had in this issue. We have flash fiction by Catherine Lacy and Hilary Leichter, who are both writers who I've really admired for a long time. And then also a sort of longer story by Melissa Lozada Oliva. And all three of these stories are very, like, strange and surreal. And I was thinking about, like, what it is about fiction that sort of, like, helps further these food narratives.

19:12And I thought it was sort of striking that, like, all three of these pieces are, like, taking something as, like, mundane as a cookie, taking them into sort of, like, fantastical realms. So like in Hillary's piece, and she's also the author of Temporary and Tara's Story. In Hillary's piece, we have a woman who's like inhabiting a gingerbread house, like the one that like a child would make. And it's told in a very sort of like straightforward, almost Alice Munro-esque way. But like she's living in a gingerbread house and it's starting to sort of like crumble around her. But at first you don't realize she's mentioning that the staircase is a little sticky and, oh, maybe she just didn't clean that well.

19:52And that, like, the cobwebs are sugar-like. And then you realize, oh, it's not a metaphor. It's actually a gingerbread house. Exactly. These sort of, like, alarming cookie-encrusted details are making their way through the narrative. And you start to realize, like, oh, something is not what it seems here. And then, you know, in Catherine Lacey's piece, we have a bunch of adults like waiting in line for this viral sort of, you know, famous cookie. And at first it sort of has this air of like mundanity, like, you know, we've all done this before. We've waited in line for something. And then it becomes clear that, you know, in order to get the allotted cookie, you have to meet the artisan's demands.

20:29And this artisan is potentially subjecting people in line to like psychological or physical torture. which I love because I think that like the absurdity of waiting in a viral cookie line is stranger than fiction but it is fiction in this piece and honestly who among us has not waited in a viral cookie line or something similar and maybe you don't actually have to prostrate yourself in front of a baker but there is a certain degree of like how long are you going to wait is this actually going to be worth it totally I like all of those I think like I don't edit fiction so I just love to read them when they come in and and have them in that context Another kind of maybe seemingly unconventional piece in this issue that was really a pet project of mine is this piece, If You Give a Shark a Cookie, that Sabrina Imbler wrote for us, which is not about any sort of, well, I guess you could eat it, but it's about the cookie cutter shark, which is a real - Are they edible?

21:21I mean, you can eat anything if you really put your mind to it, but I think they're probably protected. I would not advise eating this shark, but the shark is called the cookie cutter shark because it takes perfect circular bites out of all of its victims. There's a really great collage in the piece that kind of showcases like why the bites are so perfect that they would be called cookie cutter. And then Sabrina does such a great job, as they do in all of their writing, of kind of connecting these very alien sea creatures to very human experiences. in this one it's kind of like using the shark as a motivational figure because the shark is eating orcas and great whites and submarines all these things that are much bigger than the shark itself and they're kind of inviting us to be taking bites out of things that are larger than our own which the piece came about because I literally just started sending Sabrina links to different cookie-based sea creatures of which there are maybe five on Wikipedia what are the other ones Oh, no.

22:16There's a starfish that's called like the cookie starfish. I think that's the only one I could riff off the top of my head. But a couple of them are out there, which I think is fun on multiple levels because it shows that scientists, which I would think of as maybe being clinical, are thinking about cookies when they're naming creatures, which is kind of wholesome and sweet. And then at the same time, it's a shark that's taking bites out of people, which is maybe like not so sweet at all. Yeah, I think that's what's really cool about this issue is that like we have so many different iterations of what a tough cookie can be.

22:47We have like metaphorical cookies, you know, in like sort of the HTML variety. We have Gabriella Burnham, who's a novelist who wrote a really interesting piece about freezing your eggs. We have the cookie monster in Times Square, which was also one of your pet pieces. Yeah, so we record the Taste podcast close to Times Square. I don't often see the mascots on my way to work, which honestly, maybe I should reroute my commute so I can experience this more. But there are people that dress up as Cookie Monster in Times Square. And we did send out a reporter, Katie Way, to find and interview someone that dresses up as Cookie Monster about the ins and outs of a job that can only be described as tough.

23:27Did we ever invite them to our party? We did not invite the Cookie Monster to the party, which maybe is a misstep. But I do plan on bringing him a magazine. And I would love to get a photo of the Cookie Monster reading the magazine in Times Square. I think that would be so perfect. It would. So I want to talk a little bit about mass-produced cookies because I think this is another thing that sets cookies apart from, say, pies or cakes, which is that there are so many, like, snack cookies such as, like, Oreo or Nutter Butter that are out there. And I'm just thinking that people are more likely to buy a mass-produced cookie than they would be a cake.

24:00Does that resonate with you? Yeah, I think so. I think it's, again, sort of this lower commitment snacking quality to a cookie. I mean, I remember eating a lot of bags of Famous Amos. Do you remember those? They were the chocolate chip cookies. Yeah, but they're a thin cookie, a thin snappy cookie. No, that's a Tate. No, that's a Tate. Like the famous Amos are like they're like sort of the size of a quarter and they're kind of thick and they're like sandy, sandy, crumbly, sort of like 10 to 15 cookies per bag. And I always loved the abundance of that. So I would buy buy the bags and then they would like crumble when you dipped them in milk in a really pleasing way.