Cake Zine Volume 5: Candy Land

 Cake Zine’s fifth issue, Candy Land, unwraps candy’s connections to the literal and metaphorical land. It’s ninety-six pages of essays, recipes, fiction, and art, including:

• Conversations with the doomsday preppers prioritizing pleasure at the end of the world by Amy Rose Spiegel
• An exploration of raver kandi culture in late stage EDM by Simon Wu
• An essay by Leslie Jamison on building candy houses to steer her daughter away from the wild woods of restriction
• A reflection on how climate change is impacting farming for cacao, grapes, and other fruits by eco futurist Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri
• An interview with flavor scientist Dr. Arielle Johnson on the scientific reasons behind our blue raspberry cravings by Dominique Evans
• Recipes for dirt ‘n’ worms tiramisu, crunchy alegría, and crystalline kohakutou by Zoe Denenberg, Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, and Rie McClenny
• Sweet and surreal fiction by Sanaë Lemoine, Puloma Ghosh, and Celina Baljeet Basra
• A timeline of the many iterations of Candy Land (the iconic board game, not the magazine) and how these changes mirror real world events by Elaine Mao
• Plus a reflection on growing up in the Hershey’s corporate candy town, a dissection of the contemporary tanghulu trend beyond TikTok, a brief but insidious history of banana candy, a trip dumpster diving for Theo’s chocolate in the gentrifying Pacific Northwest, an ode to aspartame, and more.