A slog, then a lamb cake

April 2025

Hello! I’m keeping this monthly report turbo-short (for me!), then hitting your inboxes again in about a week with a long-promised recipe for a pretty rad vegan breakfast sandwich that you can make ahead. So get pumped for that?

Writing

Last month I went long on writing process, and grandiosely announced, “I’m going to publish Part Two next month, come what may!” But guess what? I lied. April went by in sort of slow blur, and while I’d hoped to be well into the “Press-down” part of my novel process, setting me up to present the details to you with excitement and verve, I find myself still puddling away. This is partly because I’m now into the final leg of the book which takes place on a sailboat travelling along the St. Lawrence River. I’m taking my first sailing lesson at the end of May and heading to the Gaspésie and Côte Nord at the end of June (!!!), so I’ve decided to puddle through the whole rest of the book before I leave, then spend the summer tidying up (aka “pressing down”) the whole lot when I have the mental pictures I need to make the thing go. Which is very exciting! But the writing this month has been of the more perfunctory, sloggy variety — just inching along, much like the Spring which is taking longer to fully arrive than it ever has in my entire life??

Reading

I read a grand total of one (1) novel in April, A Stranger in Olandria by Sofia Samatar. I mentioned last month how hallucinogenic and incredible her The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain was, and that wild mind is evident in this book as well. But I never quite got into a solid rhythm with it. It’s a bit more philosophical than plotty, a lot of stories within stories, and my brain is so badly riven with the holes typical of this phone-staring-pop-fascist-genocidal-fake-slop age that it’s frustratingly hard for me to stick with things like that for any length of time. Which is precisely why I persisted, and I’m glad I did. It’s a weird little book about ghosts and angels and books and religion (I think?) and the prose is dreamy, like a trip that weaves between totally enlightening and scary as hell.

Eating

Your girl’s very deep in the pastry-testing trenches these days, I feel about 85% there with a bunch of new veganization experiments, but much like the novel there has been a lot of slog and very little actual payoff all month. Except! MY FUCKING LAMB CAKE!

If you’re at all into baking internet, you already know the genius of

Bronwen Wyatt

and her fantastic lamb cake tutorial, which uses a loaf cake plus two cupcakes to democratize the lamb cake beyond those bakers in possession of the proper mold. For mine, I decided to go off book and used a jelly roll instead of a loaf because I had made

Camilla Wynne

’s forced rhubarb jam and wanted to use it to fill the cake.

Behold her hot pink interior!

And I used canelé molds to make the cupcakes because, well, I recently bought canelé molds and I thought they’d make a nice snouty shape.

The frosting is a vegan riff on Wynne’s custard buttercream from Nature’s Candy — I basically whipped a batch of my vegan pastry cream with a bunch of coconut oil and powdered sugar. It turned out totally great and then I put it in the fridge and tried to re-whip when it was still cold and it curdled into a million oily pieces. It took a solid hour to cream back together, and I thank the millions of baking youtubers I watched who urged me to keep the faith on lamb cake night — around 11pm it got back to pipeable and tasted awesome!

Shoutout to my beloved David for getting pretty invested in lamb cake night and taking action shots!

Finally, I decorated her with candied rhubarb bows, horns, and jewels, also from Wynne’s Nature’s Candy, and then she was done. I have to tell you I just loved this lamb so very much, her face surprised me a lot!

Thank you forever to

Bronwen Wyatt

for the lamb cake palooza. Both making my own and seeing over one hundred other lamb cakes over the Easter weekend gave me the hit of dopamine I needed to blast through the April slog. This year Wyatt made her own incredible entry in support of the Trans Income Project in Louisiana where she lives, so I made a donation on behalf of my lamb and myself, too. It was clear that’s what this lamb wanted me to do.

That’s it! Back soon! Vegan breakfast sandwich! Get pumped!