Bakery Letter #10
Spiral symbolism, and what At Heart has been up to.
Last month when I was reading Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative a book on structure in writing by Jane Alison, I started noticing spirals everywhere. In the seashells I collected from Santa Cruz on my trip home that now live on a windowsill in the bakery; on conchas themselves (though I’m partial to the classic shell shape on my own conchas). In the center of a split purple cabbage. On my camera roll from last November when I made spirals out of candied orange peel to use for cake decoration. When I would open Instagram one of my favorite accounts, Endless Spiral, would be right at the top of my feed. The book triggered pattern recognition.
“Spirals are omnipresent, enduring and infinitely fascinating, but they are also enigmatic, which is perhaps why they lend themselves to interpretations that are, as Jung put it, ‘cosmic.’” - Beverly D’Silva
It was the tarot that taught me to appreciate patterns, imagery, symbolism. The other week when I was turning my dresser inside and out looking for At Heart stickers to take to my pop up, I noticed my deck had collected dust. Preoccupied with all the newness happening around me at the time, I hadn’t used it at all since we moved to Decatur a year ago now. Wiping it clean, I moved the deck from the dresser on the other side of my bedroom to my nightstand. I’m pulling a card at the start of each week again, reading Rachel Pollack once again. And again reminded through the 8 of Pentacles I pulled on Monday how, as Pollack reminds us in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, “The way to Spirit for Pentacles lies not so much in success, or even awareness of value in ordinary things, as in the work that allows us to appreciate those things.” Literally dusting off my deck was all it took for me to spiral around back again to a necessary-for-me tarot practice.
“However much we follow our standards and instincts or seek our own development, the work we do lacks meaning if it does not serve the community.” - Rachel Pollack
Bakery Life This Week
This week is a slow one, comparatively, which is funny when you know that I still fulfilled a mini cake catering order for an artist dinner at Wolfgang Gallery. 90 cakes in total, I made a piloncillo oil-based cake (I stick with grapeseed oil for baking unless I’m making an olive oil cake), a jamaica lemon curd filling for which I’m working on a recipe that I’ll publish later this month, and frosted with a buttercream made with LUCID, Brightland’s lemon-infused olive oil.
It was probably Los Angeles-based pastry chef Hannah Ziskin who I first saw add olive oil to buttercream. Aside from the beautiful sheen olive oil brings, it also tones down the sweetness by a lot, which makes it a great choice for people who think they don’t like buttercream (along with an appropriate/hefty amount of salt).
The weekly pop ups at Opo have been reaffirming. Each day of the week now is dedicated to a menu item and its prep. This reliability in each day, these weekly rituals have been the single most important aspect to me so far about the pop ups. Before, nearly every week was completely different, the work ahead of me based entirely on my cake calendar. Now I know that every Tuesday is empanada day, so I need to remember to soak the beans Monday night1; every Wednesday now is reserved for making the cake fillings and cookie doughs, so I macerate the fruit the night before, take the butter out of the fridge so it’s ready to go when I am. I lose sleep on Fridays, but it’s the price I pay for the conchas, who get whatever they need from me.
If I think about these pop up rituals that I repeat again and again each week as a kind of spiral, at its center is the heart of At Heart, the heart in At Heart. And from there, everything I hope this bakery represents coils outward: showing through the work what can be done on a small scale as way to reject the capitalistic impulse for GROWTH and SCALE at all costs; a responsibility and accessibility to my irl community as a person who works with food; another rejection: self-publishing as a decline of, and a polite but sometimes outright impolite “no, thank you” to the control over the work one tends to lose with traditonal modes of publication.
If a spiral is self-perpetuating, can my work be as well? This newsletter certainly is; it continues as I do. It’s changed in format as my life has changed. On that note I’m feeling ready to share recipes again, probably because fall baking is in the air and then not long after, the holidays. On deck right now I’ve got the hibiscus curd previously mentioned, a new tres leches recipe using all plant-based milks (I’m done with condensed milk), a focaccia with masa harina that will also be in my forthcoming zine (more on that, and a preorder link very soon).
I’ve been publishing on Substack for one year this week, and in this last year I’ve felt my oldest dream — way before baking ever entered my life, by the way — of writing, having people read me, not entirely fulfilled but getting there.
perhaps an unnecessary step since I’m using heirloom beans, but going through them and removing any debris, then swishing the beans around in a bowl with cold water before bed is another one of my rituals.