First Quarter Check-In

Hello! 

First, for my beloved locals - click here for early access to April orders- starting at 8am! In a desperate bid to fix my broken body, I’ll be at pilates between 9 and 10am, so won’t be around between those hours to monitor sales and pars. Feel free to put me in the absolute weeds! Also shout out to Chelsea, a gentle and thorough teacher, who you can find here. 

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Speaking of weeds, I’ve been frankly weeded all month and that isn’t likely to end anytime soon. In lieu of a proper newsletter, I thought I’d do a quick check in about what’s happening over here in cakeland. 

Fig leaves are here! 

Every morning for the past few weeks, I’ve woken and parted the curtain in our bedroom to check on the fig tree in our backyard. This past week it has fully exploded with leaves, and even the very first (still green and hard) figs. It’s bittersweet: an early spring, or global warming? Either way, next month’s menu will feature the return of strawberry preserved with fig leaf custard, a forever favorite pairing. 

Will you make a lamb cake this Easter?

In a perfect world I would have a whole tutorial ready to go but in this imperfect world, I drew some sketches on Procreate and present you with this: my instructions for making a lamb cake without a lamb pan. Please show me if you attempt!

A new online class is coming.

Yesterday I started filming my next online class offering - a brand new instructional video for a technique I’ve been fine-tuning for several years now. The video will come with four new + updated recipes, including one for something I’m calling “all purpose cake custard” - a stable, rich, yet light cake filling that can be endlessly infused and flavored. That’s all I’m ready to say about that just now, but if you can correctly guess the subject of the class in the comments I’ll send you a free copy when we’ve finished! Very grateful to my friend Drew Stubbs for filming and editing and dealing with the fact that we don’t refrigerate our cans of seltzer. 

Prunes + Cake

The team behind California Prunes are coming into town next week, so I’ve been working on a new cake recipe for them that we’ll debut on Sunday during our first collab in-person cake decorating class. I believe as of writing this that there’s one ticket left if you’d like to try your hand at weirdo lambeth! I also developed a hybrid Russian-American buttercream recipe that tastes like my ideal version of grocery store cake icing.  I’ll publish both of those recipes here soon.

Rice Pudding Reigns 

Writer Bettina Makalintal published a recent rice pudding roundup for Eater that very kindly namechecks this newsletter and my insistence that 2024 was going to be the year of my favorite creamy dessert. She also does a much better job than I did of recognizing that rice pudding is a crucial cultural food for many, many people- far beyond my personal history with Kozy Shack. My wife’s aunt recently inquired if I’d be willing to back tapioca next - she enjoys hers with crushed saltines, and that combo has been haunting me (in a good way) ever since. 

How are the trend predictions going?

So far I can with confidence say I was right about rice pudding, and right about Ireland, subject of more than a few 2024 trend pieces in one way or another. Here, too, I come to you shamefacedly to admit I was wrong about bows, which continue to be featured prominently by both Sandy Liang and 2024 Prada, and probably will be lurking in the cultural zeitgeist a bit longer. I even put one on a cake last weekend.

That’s all for now!