Emotional Eating

Even at this early hour, Bush is cheerful and decidedly awake. She keeps baker’s hours and has been up since 5:30AM, when she braved the frigid temperatures to walk the thirty minutes from her Park Slope apartment to the cafe. When I ask her how she maintains her busy lifestyle she mentions a steady caffeine habit. “I was really doing the Celsius thing for a second,” she answers. “But then my best friend, who's an ER doctor, forced me to stop. She was like, ‘You can’t keep doing this, it’s going to kill you.’” (Tons of chemicals.)

Bush has been in perpetual motion since my arrival. Her short blonde hair is tucked neatly behind a taut bandana, and she’s already mid-way through the morning’s bake-off, where she bakes all of the pastries for the day, placing the final touches on some of the city’s most sought-after confections.

It’s a calculated choreography, one that Bush moves through with habitual precision as she talks me through the day’s plan. “First, I’m going to finish the bake-off, and then you’re going to help me make some apple fritters. Don’t worry,” she teases, “I know you didn’t come here to be put to work.” In the space of a sentence she’s already fished the golden brown crullers out of their hot oil bath to cool and begun whisking a large bowl of salty maple glaze, which will be drizzled over a batch of the fritters. A tray of perfect, enormous cinnamon rolls have also materialized on the stainless steel prep table.

For Bush, who is also a writer and the co-founder of the food publication Cake Zine, baking appears as second nature. Her new book, Will This Make You Happy?, out now reveals that this has not always been the case. Part memoir and part cookbook, it unfolds across a year in Bush’s life, in which she rediscovers baking: first as a hobby, or rather a lifeline out of a pandemic-inflected, post-graduate malaise, and then eventually, as a full-time profession. “It’s a time capsule of a moment,” exclaims Bush from somewhere inside of the basement kitchen’s walk-in. She explains while rifling for ingredients that she’s always been drawn to stories that allow for slippage across genres. “I’m 29, so this was never going to be a cradle-to-grave memoir.”

Often cookbooks serve as aspirational lifestyle tomes, conjuring forth images of the consummate host, a la Martha Stewart’s exhaustively curated tablescapes, or the fantasy kitchen: Alice Waters’ signature copper egg spoon sizzling over the roaring blaze of an open hearth. In Will This Make You Happy? we find ourselves transported instead to Bush’s cramped Brooklyn kitchen (cockroaches and all) as she learns how to temper eggs and infuse pastry cream. Bush’s experiments result in failure as much as they do success: “It illustrates this sort of reckoning that happens when you try to find a sense of purpose or meaning by teaching yourself a new skill. The recipes get increasingly difficult as the narrator gets better, too.”

Alongside inventive recipes for neapolitan pavlovas we are plunged into Bush’s rich emotional inner world, as she navigates a stagnating long-term relationship, a disenchanting internship at an agriturismo in Tuscany, and the rollercoaster of a budding crush. Populated by characters who are given names like The Boyfriend and The Crush, Bush’s pursuit of pastry is propulsive, documenting her negotiations between desire and disaffection, flirtations with hedonism and their ensuing sugar crashes. Here, dessert serves not only as a proxy for delight or indulgence, but also disappointment, reconciliation, and triumph.

“When you're following a recipe, you're collapsing the space between yourself and the recipe writer. It’s like you’re embodying their life,” says Bush. “I wanted to make it so that a reader could sort of entwine themselves with the narrator and the characters.”

For Bush, recipes offer a structure to take comfort in, rules to abide by and to subvert. “I am always interested in the space that exists between the rules, figuring out what changes and tweaks might be exciting to me.” This affinity for finding the pockets within constraint is how she settled on the year-long timeline for the story and its division into 52 vignettes. “It helped me become less scared of the blank page,” she says. Bush is perceptive when it comes to the infrastructures and routines necessary to mediate the creeping existentialism that comes with sustaining a creative practice. It’s why she joined an M.F.A. program in creative nonfiction at Hunter College after she’d already drafted her book proposal: “I knew I wanted a literary community and that sort of support and feedback while I was writing this.” It’s also why she keeps one foot in the food world and the other in the literary world. “There’s this multi-tasking that’s inherent to baking and I kind of thrive off of that momentum in other ways, in writing as well,” she says. “I need this constant motion, having other projects gives me structure as well, otherwise I would procrastinate until the end.”

Much has changed for Bush since she was the searching 23-year-old depicted in the book. She joined Little Egg as part of the cafe’s opening team after working with the restaurant’s chef Evan Hanzcor on his Table of Contents dinner series, which brings the literary to life with book-inspired meals. She also married The Boyfriend last fall. The years of distance were helpful when she set about writing the book. “I was writing in retrospect, and therefore I could feel some sort of tenderness for that younger version of myself,” she says. Bush, who has had the same therapist for 15 years, likens the process of writing the character to the therapy exercise of convening with the younger self. “I wrote most of this book curled up in a ball under the kitchen table. Probably to bring myself closer to that time,” she jokes.

The book’s title is a play on Bush’s popular Instagram account, where she’s posted her bakes under the moniker @will.this.make.me.happy since 2020. Each entry is a rejoinder to the question posed in her handle. The snapshots uniformly feature Bush’s hand holding one of her concoctions against a watery blue and turquoise striped background (a painting that her husband purchased for their home because he found it cheerful). An immaculate, Thiebauld-ian slice of chocolate almond cake with layers of vanilla whipped cream and black cherry jam elicits a resounding “no.” In the caption, Bush writes that it “did not keep me from constantly see-sawing between existential hopelessness and chaotic cheer.” The book largely omits Bush’s burgeoning social media presence from the time. “If there’s anything more boring than writing about Instagram, it’s reading about Instagram,” she laughs.

That’s not to say that Instagram hasn’t played a major role in Bush’s arc as a baker. Through the platform, Bush has managed to cultivate a sprawling community of bakers, chefs, and food writers. Her frequent collaborations on specialty pastries for Little Egg are a who’s who of New York City’s food scene. It was also through Instagram that she met Aliza Abarbanel, a contributing editor at TASTE Magazine and Bush’s co-founder at Cake Zine, after she slid into Abarbanel’s DMs with an irresistible offer— free strawberries ‘n cream cookies, extras from a recipe test.

Across its seven editions, Cake Zine has developed somewhat of a cult following. The literary magazine has carved out a niche for itself, providing emerging writers and established authors like Catherine Lacey or pastry chefs like Natasha Pickowicz alike with a platform to tackle sweet-oriented topics that range from the search for the blackmarket mango-flavored Juul to a recipe for salt-and-vinegar chip pie. Playful and personal, Cake Zine’s curation is a reflection of Bush and Abarbanel’s interest in the politics behind a craving, the idea that something as simple as a cookie or a slice of cake might provide insight into the broader relationships between pleasure and power.

“Baking and writing are both incredibly lonely processes,” Bush observes, when I ask her about Cake Zine’s founding. “I was either alone at home or baking in a basement kitchen. I needed to find something where I could be with others.”

The apple fritters have been batched, scooped onto parchment paper-lined trays and placed in the refrigerator to set before tomorrow’s bake-off. And Bush’s apron and bandana have been shed and replaced with an enviable cream and espresso-striped intarsia sweater featuring an image of a bunny—a Camille Zacky creation that was a gift from her husband for her birthday. We’re bundling up in preparation to face the still below-freezing elements. She pulls on a chic, calf-length black shearling jacket and a matching hat. “I went to college in Minnesota, so I’m supposed to be used to this weather.”

Walking, Bush tells me, is her preferred method of getting around the city. Amidst her busy schedule, her favorite thing to do is to set a food-related destination and trek there by foot. “It sets a nice cadence for spending time with someone,” she says, “and you have something delicious at the end.” With this habit, she often covers a lot of ground—her most well-tread route is down to Brighton Beach, where she has a Georgian restaurant she likes. Today we’re taking a shorter walk to Ouma, a newly opened bakery and cafe in Prospect Lefferts Gardens where our mutual friend Kaitlyn Wong runs the pastry program.

Lulled into the rhythm of our quick clip, we talk about her plans after her prolific book promotion schedule ends, “I really want to plan a party for twins, there are so many of us,” she says, gracefully dodging a dirty snowbank. We also talk about her wardrobe planning for the upcoming book tour.

“I think as a baker, I’m careful about not presenting as too trad,” she deadpans. “But to be honest, I really do think way too much about what I put on my body. I have this really nice, classic Prada dress with a high neckline, but then I’m planning on wearing it over pants.” We both agree that Martha Stewart would never wear a dress over pants.

At Ouma, we’re welcomed by Wong, who selects a few fresh treats from the pastry case for us to try. As Bush picks at a square of scallion focaccia, flecked with sesame seeds—an homage to qiang bing, she tries to recall how she first met Wong, a frequent collaborator who also runs the baking substack A Balcony in Brooklyn. “I think we became friends over the internet, I made your polenta cake recipe and posted it. It was soooo good.”

The two talk shop, commiserating over their shared hatred of butter cream—“I don’t want to eat that much raw butter unless it’s slathered on a baguette or served with a radish”—and trading tips on baking and the day-to-day operations of running a bakery. Bush also recounts a cake delivery from late last summer with Wong, a special blue-hued, triple-layer wedding cake. “We had to Uber with it all the way to Coney Island, we were worried about the cake because it was so hot,” she says.“But once we delivered it, we jumped into the ocean to cool down. It was the best day.”

From flavor, to texture, to visual presentation, baking is about balance. For Bush this might mean trading the chalky sweetness of buttercream for the light, surprising tang of a labneh-based frosting or blending almond flour with all-purpose flour to achieve a more buoyant cake crumb. In Will This Make You Happy? this sensibility is translated across Bush’s own coming-of-age story, where delight often comes intertwined with disappointment.

Bush tells me that, in the end, the book was never about the question in the title, but about “finding one’s appetite.”

Isabel Ling is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is the managing editor at The Architect’s Newspaper, and was formerly the senior editor of MOLD Magazine.