Natasha Pickowicz’s debut cookbook, More Than Cake (Artisan, Apr.), showcases her distinctive aesthetic and her commitment to social justice. The James Beard Award–winning pastry chef is known for incorporating the unexpected—a glug of shoyu to zhuzh up peanut cookies or a handful of tulip petals to garnish a layer cake—and for her charity bake sales, which serve as a platform for resistance and change. Her June 2022 event at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre raised $22,000 for the Brigid Alliance, which offers financial and logistical support for people traveling to receive abortion care. Pickowicz spoke with PW about her influences, building trust with readers, and baking with purpose.
What inspires your work?
I want to bring something unexpected to cake-making. It’s an incredible tradition with so much variation and so many distinct styles. My mom is from China, and I grew up with flavors like adzuki bean and black sesame and soy sauce. It’s fun to think about the canon of pastry, and bring in flavors that feel nostalgic to me. I wanted to speak to that and show people that these things are versatile.
Your creations look different from traditional bakes, too—why is that?
I don’t want to make a sugar rose. I don’t really know how to do that and I don’t care to know. I feel way more inspired aesthetically by picking the fennel fronds from my backyard in Greenpoint [Brooklyn] or using the fig leaf from the tree that’s growing outside of my window. A little stick with a leaf is incredibly pretty perched on top of a little piece of cake. There are beautiful things that are within our reach.
What do you want to convey to your readers?
I know that if I’m making a recipe from a book and it doesn’t go the way that it’s explained or what the photo looks like, that breaks my trust with the author. Things go wrong for me all the time. I’ve made every single mistake that you can make. But you can almost always save something or at least learn why it happened, and then you do it differently next time. What I hope for the reader is what I hope for myself when I’m looking at a recipe: am I learning something new? I provide a safety net in the text of every recipe in case something goes wrong. I want to communicate that sense of safety to a reader and hope that my text is persuasive enough so that people can dive into something that they wouldn’t usually dive into.
What’s the connection between baking and service?
I’m here to give you strategies for what to do with that muffin you make. Where does it go? Who are you feeding? Community organizing is incredibly empowering. We’re not living in vacuums. We all have something that speaks to us. Once you start sharing with others, it’s an intoxicating feeling where you’re like, I’m grooving with people. I’m contributing. I’m doing something I believe in. Organizing doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. Even if you bake a few things and sell them at your local wine shop or in the park and raise $50, that’s great. It’s not about the amount of money. It’s about the feeling of doing and connecting with other people.
