The Kitchen Tasks in Front of Me

Plus, results from my first subscriber survey.

A couple of weeks ago while swooping matcha buttercream on the sides of a customer’s cake, offset spatula an extension of my hand, I realized I was writing the last graf in my head for an essay I’d been struggling with. On another day as I was pushing out the air in the pastry bag I fitted with a star tip then slowly piped a shell border along the entire surface of the cake, the first sentences of a recipe headnote for the zine seemed to work themselves out, without much input from me.

I’m immersed in kitchen tasks. Preparing the fruit for jam, slicing fuzzy peach skins away from juicy flesh. Hand washing cake pans and mixing bowls after a bake day, my mind and the ideas in it run just like the suds down the drain and I remember I have a bag of coconut sugar I wanted to use in a recipe test. The repetitive motions, the use of my hands, the rhythm of the kitchen, clear the route of any debris in my head from idea → sentences so I can figure out what I want to say and how I want to say it. When the writing isn’t coming as easily as I’d like, which is often the case, it means I need to do something with my hands instead of my brain.

The two aspects of my work, baking and writing, are always in relationship, informing each other in this way. The bakery work — decorating cakes with buttercream; jam-making — does double duty by revealing what is important enough to me to write about, then provides the physical space to get both out of and back into my head about it. This kitchen work is just my work.

I consider the recipe work a separate, third job even though recipe writing is just writing brought to life through a different process than an essay or blog post. The development of a recipe also lets my head figure things out while my hands are busy in the kitchen. A recipe test occurs as a series of experiments that rarely go well the first or second or even third time around. But it’s in the figuring out, the tinkering with measurements and bake times that ideas for the next essay or Bakery Letter seem to most often bubble up to the surface.

The writing flows best when I bring a counter stool, my laptop, whatever book I’m reading, my pen and notebook over to my wooden top work bench, where the cakes get decorated and concha dough portioned, and write in the bakery. There are six windows in the dining room I converted into bakery space. The windows look out into my backyard and the canna lillies the previous owner planted in the flower bed directly under those windows peek into the bakery and sway in the wind. My writing companions. Writing from the couch or bed, my brain feels tricked. It seems to say: the couch is where we sit and watch Summer House on Bravo (if I subscribed to the idea of a guilty pleasure this would be one of them, but luckily I do not); the bed is where we fall asleep too late in the evening, this isn’t where work happens.

Earlier when hand washing the dishes after breakfast (soft scrambled eggs; overly toasted nearing on burnt everything bagel; salted butter; Cholula) I was thinking about when I first began this work and why I wanted to write recipes. Back then I had little to my name other than the audacity. I would cold pitch editors who didn’t know me from any other Teresa in the world, and got my first three food writing bylines this way. There was a time when I thought I wanted a staff job at some food media publication, back when I was still green and thought of such things as desirable. The way in, I thought. 

The bakery desk.

The real answer, for me, has always been diy. Self-publishing forced me to write with authority appointed to me by my own convictions. Which is great because it’s helped me find my writing voice, but this space —freelance recipe developer with a newsletter — has become so crowded it feels harder than ever to acquire the paid subscriptions needed to help keep that work afloat. No productive day spent in the kitchen, working things out in my hands with kitchen tasks can change that.

Last week I sent out a survey to my paying subscribers. I wanted to collect some opinions, some percentages. As of this writing I have 71 paid subscriptions—a quantity of people who if we were all standing in a room together I’d feel totally overwhelmed in a beautiful way. It was illuminating to read the results. 60% of the people who pay for this newsletter want more community features through chats, Discords or Zoom meetings. 75% are enjoying the recipe PDFs that you can print out and take with you into the kitchen, which I was inspired to offer for my recipes after seeing the brilliant Lukas Volger and Alison Roman share their own PDFs. 31% want more paywalled posts, something just for the paid subs.

I know to expect 5% - 10% of total subscribers to be willing to pay for the work, and I’m on the low end of that. Since making the move from Patreon to Substack, I’ve lost money—about $350 each month. I could really use those dollars, but I don’t regret the switch. I don’t want to give too much credit to the platform I share my work on but Substack has helped put my work on in ways I wasn’t able to achieve through Patreon, for whatever reason.

I’ve learned that people are willing to support virtually unknown, indie recipe writers if the writing is good enough, if the recipes sound and look good enough, if, when they make the recipes, they’re pleased enough with the results. It takes time to build that trust with readers, and I’m in it for the long haul.

In the survey post I mentioned wanting to lower the annual subscription price. I follow in Alicia Kennedy and others’ footsteps in this decision to be more accessible to readers. An annual subscription to At Heart Panadería used to cost $50, the suggested price when I first signed up for Substack last September — I couldn’t lower it then! — but after today it will be $30. Additionally, I’ll be hosting a seasonal chat for paying subscribers to ask me anything about baking, running a cottage bakery, how to develop your own recipes, with the first digital gathering happening on Sunday, August 18th, time and place TBD (I’ll post about it closer to the date).

And finally I’ve gotten organized enough and created an publishing schedule for the newsletter. This is mostly for my own benefit since I need to be organized in order to get anything done around here, but I’m hoping this kind of consistency is helpful to readers, too. Starting in August (in July I’m traveling home and then I turn 40 and taking a few days off—July is my slowest, laziest work month on purpose—I need the break), I’ll adhere to this schedule: Week 1: Bakery Letters; Week 2: Internet Recipe Culture essays; Week 3: a Links roundup, likely called Friday Links which will be paywalled; and finally, either a paywalled recipe or an Ingredient Feature, also paywalled.

Since I wrote A Digital Deluge of Recipes back in March and took a break from frequent recipe developing, I’m realizing I still feel very hesitant to make a definitive statement about how often I’ll share recipes. I thought a monthly basis sounded good just last week, but then I started to feel worried about things like the recipes being finicky, food waste and food cost. I still don’t have an answer. But focused on swooping buttercream, slicing fruit to prepare for jam, handwashing the dishes, my hands will be occupied as they usually are. I can’t hold my phone or scroll during these moments, and I half joke that this is a large reason why I continue to run a bakery. Truthfully though, it’s the kitchen work that keeps it all going through the task in front of me.