How inspiration strikes

A murky answer to the question of "what inspires you?"

A quick preamble for locals - you can order and prepay for slices for Saturday’s popup beginning at 5:45 pm this evening, Thursday the 15th (I’m giving newsletter subscribers a head start!). All sales will be via pre-order this round, and I’ll be using the online storefont Minimart to streamline payment. You can check out the menu and place an order here, and if you haven’t used my minimart before, you’ll need to set up a profile first. You won’t be able to place an order before 5:45.

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I’m often asked where I take inspiration from in cake design. Like all questions regarding my work, the query makes me want to be immediately swallowed by the sea. It’s nothing against the person asking - it’s a valid question! - but I’ve always felt squirrelly around describing my own creative process. There is the easy answer (that also happens to be true). I obviously take inspiration from other cake bakers. The internet cake club is full of technically brilliant cake designers as well as brilliantly chaotic home bakers. I like my own work best when it rides the line between beautiful and weird, and that line can move all the time based on my mood or whatever online cake trend I’ve been inspired by that week. Below, I borrowed the popular look of the extra-wide basketweave piping tip squiggle and tried to make it my own with a muted color palette and dried florals.

Another avenue that’s helpful for stirring inspiration is a classic: constraint. I tap into this most in early January or the dead heat of middle summer in New Orleans, when my flower farmers have little variety to offer and I have to make do with less. Floral cake design feels effortless when I have eight or nine different kinds of blooms to choose from, and I don’t have to worry that a client won’t like a simple floral wreath cake with a variety of flowers. These cakes are lovely! They impress! And there’s nothing wrong with that. But in August when all but the sturdiest of sunflowers have been blasted by the sun or rotted into the earth by the daily pounding rain, I have to work harder to design a cake that I believe will meet the client's expectations. Under this pressure, I’ve often made my favorite cakes - like this one, featuring immature dwarf tamarillos and green scuppernongs (a southern grape varietal).

I’m not sure, however, that this really addresses the deeper question that people are asking here - where does inspiration come from? What inspires anyone to make art, or design something unique? The answer that reverberates unspoken in my head is - who knows? I’m not there when that happens.  

This past week I visited the Ohr-O'keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi. The museum has a world class collection of southern pottery, but aside from the schadenfreude of watching a Frank Gehry building slowly dissolve in the Gulf Coast salt air, my favorite exhibit was an odd one-off from the artist Mario Petrirena. Placed in one of Gehry’s futurist “pods” (the one, in fact, featuring a pigeon nest in the eves), Petrirena had assembled a pile of broken remnants from his artistic practice - shattered bits of glazed pottery, broken glass, and many tiny human faces crafted from clay. His artist’s statement read:

“In the making” speaks to the creative process, something I find incredibly hard to talk about much less explain. It is a mystery to me and I hope it remains that way. My attempts to create come with struggles, difficulties, many failures, countless attempts. It is not easy, however I continue. There is no other choice for me.” 

I don’t find much kinship with the trope of the tortured artist driven by forces beyond their control. I don’t really even think that baking is art, but rather a craft. A skilled craftsperson can achieve surprising results with a medium, but a cake is meant to be used, like a beautiful chair, and I don’t personally believe that is quite the same as a piece of art. I’ve tried jumpstarting my creative energy by journaling daily a la the Artist’s Way, or listening to countless hours of podcasts where tech bros explain how to biohack a flow state. It all leaves me feeling stiff, pretentious, and decidedly uninspired. I cannot try not to try. If only we all could, like Gehry, crumple up a piece of paper and toss it to an assistant to do the difficult work of transcribing it into a functional drawing for a building! Regardless, I’ve found that the route that inspiration takes when either crafting, baking, or making art feel equally mysterious. Like Petrirena, I think I prefer it that way.

A close up of In the Making by Mario Petrirena, as well as the inside of my own skull on a particularly frustrating creative day.