Cake Zine, Vol.7 – Forbidden Fruit

Cake Zine is a hedonistic exploration of history, pop culture, literature, and art through sweets.

In this issue:

Cake Zine’s seventh issue, Forbidden Fruit, explores how fruit fuels temptation and transgression. It’s one hundred and six pages of essays, recipes, art, and more including:

• Unholy marriages of vice and sweetness, like a scene report on the strawberry jaba juice fueling Nairobi nightlife by Awuor Onguru, and Ankit Sethi’s frantic search for blackmarket mango-flavored Juul pods
• An exploration of Corsican strawberries, class, and the fruits of labor by K Chiucarello
• A surreal short story on pomegranates by Xita Rubert, winner of the 2024 Premio Herralde de Novela
• An oral history of Fire Island’s queer Eden, Cherry Grove, by Emma Banks
• Questioning the all-American status of apple pie and Florida fruit juice, by Rafaella Basseli and Grayston Samuels 
• A profile of Bilal, an ever-optimistic clerk in one of Barcelona’s many fruterias powered by illicit labor, by Sithara Ranasinghe
• A reckoning with orange soda by New York Magazine’s Chris Crowley
• A deconstruction of the immigrant fruit-plate-as-love-language trope by Giri Nathan 
• Recipes to fuel our deepest produce cravings: durian snow skin mooncakes by Mei Liao, pomegranate icebox cake by Mina Stone, gooey tonka bean butter cakes by Rose Wilde, guava nicuatole by Yara Herrera, and strawberry atole cake by Teresa Finney.
• Plus: The confessions of a child mango thief, a cannabis baker’s struggle to beat her fruit allergies, the cult of fruitarianism, and more.