Cake Zine – Candy Land

Cake Zine’s fifth issue, Candy Land, unwraps candy’s connections to the literal and metaphorical land. It’s ninety-six pages of essays, recipes, fiction, and art, including: conversations with the doomsday preppers prioritizing pleasure at the end of the world by Amy Rose Spiegel; an exploration of raver kandi culture in late stage EDM by Simon Wu; an essay by Leslie Jamison on building candy houses to steer her daughter away from the wild woods of restriction; a reflection on how climate change is impacting farming for cacao, grapes, and other fruits by eco futurist Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri; an interview with flavor scientist Dr. Arielle Johnson on the scientific reasons behind our blue raspberry cravings by Dominique Evans
Recipes for dirt ‘n’ worms tiramisu, crunchy alegría, and crystalline kohakutou by Zoe Denenberg, Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, and Rie McClenny; sweet and surreal fiction by Sanaë Lemoine, Puloma Ghosh, and Celina Baljeet Basra; aA timeline of the many iterations of Candy Land (the iconic board game, not the magazine) and how these changes mirror real world events by Elaine Mao; plus a reflection on growing up in the Hershey’s corporate candy town, a dissection of the contemporary tanghulu trend beyond TikTok, a brief but insidious history of banana candy, a trip dumpster diving for Theo’s chocolate in the gentrifying Pacific Northwest, an ode to aspartame, and more.