cake as queer offering
wren awry
Cakes are served at special occasions because they represent our best culinary offering, honoring our most loved people.
Cake says: you’re important and we love you.
—The Food Timeline, “What do cakes mean?”
Whenever possible, I like to show up—to book clubs and birthdays, collective meetings and community dinners—with cake. Funfetti baked in a sheet pan; an olive oil bundt studded with strawberries or scented with sage; or wacky cake, a vegan remnant of the Great Depression, mixed straight in the pan with water and vinegar. Migliaccio, a Neapolitan carnival dessert, made with lemons from a friend’s mother’s tree. Snacking cake sprinkled with powdered sugar or layer cake smeared with punch bright frosting. Cake that is often good, sometimes delicious, and occasionally all wrong, but brings me joy to make and share all the same.
Cake is not inherently queer, but over the last few years it has come to feel like an expression of my queerness and the way I move through the world. Maybe that’s because I came to baking late, resistant to it throughout my childhood due to how coded it was—and still is—with a certain kind of femininity. I wasn’t one of those cookie-making girls: instead, I seethed at the “Little girls are made of” plaques that seemed to hang on every 1990s suburban living room wall and stuck to scraping my knees on the softball field (never mind how truly bad I am at sports) and, later, getting bruised in mosh pits. When I started cooking in my late teens I focused on the savory: home fries sizzled in oil, avocado melts, thinly sliced slaw. I made pizza and prepped vegetables at restaurants but ignored what the pastry chefs were crafting out of flour, butter, and sugar. Still, during the year I worked overnight shifts at a vegetarian restaurant in North Carolina, I’d walk home at dawn and spend an hour reading my (very queer) roommate’s back issues of Martha Stewart Living, thumbing through pages of spray-painted gold cake stands and cupcakes topped with edible flowers, before falling asleep. Although I wouldn’t start baking for another half-decade, those early mornings and, by extension, that year surrounded by nonbinary and transmasculine folks who didn’t dismiss—and in many cases embraced—domesticity set me on a path to the baker I would become.
Two hands, on the left and right of the image, cut into a slice of strawberry-topped cake with forks. Photo by Tyler Espinoza.
A cake sits on a wooden cutting board on a light pink tablecloth. It is a yellow cake, with two layers. It is filled with whipped cream and strawberries, and topped with strawberries and rose petals. Photo by Tyler Espinoza.
Five years into a baking hobby, I find myself thinking not just about how to bake cakes, but about what making them signifies to me. I often deviate from set recipes and improvise—sprinkling fresh thyme into a batter or subbing in a bit of rye flour—just as my nonbinary gender is an act of deviation and improvisation. Baking is a low stakes way to mess up and realize that it’s okay, that I can try again next time and that my friends (who have been so supportive of my baking, reacting to what I sometimes worry is a barrage of cakes with excitement and delight) will probably eat that slightly dry sponge or clumpy cream cheese frosting anyway. Both the cake and I are works-in-progress, engaged in continual processes of being and becoming.
While I enjoy making desserts for birthdays and holidays, I also like showing up to complicated organizing meetings with pumpkin bread or delivering glazed mini-bundts to a grieving friend on a random Tuesday. Cake is a chance to trouble the binary between special occasions and the everyday, between that which is serious and that which is celebratory: a way of folding joy into the quotidian even—especially—when things are painful and difficult. While I don’t want to overstate the importance of baked goods—and it’s essential to attend to other aspects that make people feel welcome, including the ways power and privilege play out within communities and projects—cake is a way to offer a bit of radical hospitality in a world that can be discouraging to many of us, including queer and trans people. My favorite events to bake for are the free, outdoor dinners at a community space I’m part of here in Tucson. These public dinners strive to welcome new people and invite them to participate in projects of resistance and resilience, as well as bring their own expertise and excitement to the space, and my hope is that a square of carrot cake or slice of almond torte makes that welcome just a little bit sweeter.
Making cakes also lets me embrace a more fashionable side of myself. Many of my friends are incredibly stylish—some even sew their own clothes and design fashion lines—but I’ve always been more comfortable in black jeans and a t-shirt slipped over my binder. While I frequently bake simple things, when I have time and inspiration I love leaning into the colorful, complex, and over-the-top. It’s a chance to play with aesthetics and, rather than stick to one kind of cake-making, I find myself decorating with whatever I come across or am thinking about that day, from rainbow sprinkles to ruby-red blood oranges. Because I’m not wearing my cakes (except, of course, when I am—I’m a messy baker!), I can make something as ridiculous and experimental as I want, set it down, and walk away. It’s a distance that I, a shy person, appreciate.
The gap between my artistic abilities and what I want to make often inspires collaboration, be it decorating playful alien- and tarot card-themed layer cakes with a talented baker friend or folding herbs grown by another into a pound cake. Or, in the case of the cake pictured here, creating something driven by a conversation I had with my partner, photographer Tyler Espinoza, about the compositional importance of layers, colors, and visual appeal (for the shoot, I decided on an olive oil sandwich cake frosted with almond whipped cream and topped with rose petals, fresh, and freeze-dried strawberries: fruity, floral, and casually femme). I find, time and again, that the cakes I bake in collaboration with others outshine—in both the finished product and the process—what I’m able to make on my own, a reminder of the magic of collective creativity and chosen family.
Cake is, at the end of the day, just cake. But it’s also play and hospitality, mess and collaboration and sheer delight. There’s pleasure, and queerness, in that.
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It would be remiss not to mention that many of the ingredients used to make desserts—like so many other food products—are mired in contemporary labor issues, as well as histories of colonialism and racial capitalism. Sugar, in particular, bears mentioning: I recommend Ruby Tandoh’s essay “Sugartime” as a place to start learning more about its history.