Tanya Bush Would Abolish Buttercream
The pastry chef talks dessert, desire, and the foods she’s craving.
Tanya Bush is “literally constantly thinking about or ingesting sugar,” she tells me. As the pastry chef at Little Egg in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; the founder of Cake Zine, an independent literary magazine that explores culture through all things sweet; and a freelance writer focused on pastry, Bush lives and breathes dessert. (Just don’t make her taste your buttercream.)
Her new narrative cookbook, Will This Make You Happy, extends that obsession. It’s a hybrid seasonal cookbook and memoir that braids depression, desire, and a few existential crises with the recipes she was making at the time. Bush writes about teaching herself to bake during the pandemic, falling in and out of love, and chasing a doomed Eat, Pray, Love-style trip to Italy. The book’s structure mirrors her personal evolution: The recipes grow more technically complex as the narrator’s skill does. “My hope is that the book is immersive,” Bush says. “That you can sink into the story and then take it into the kitchen.”
Here, she chats with Ali about her biggest creative fears and strongest food opinions.
