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Christina Tosi has a major sweet tooth. If you watch her episode of Chef’s Table, you’ll see her order deep-fried Snickers, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Twinkies, and top it all off with deep-fried chocolate chip cookie dough.
Despite her love for all things sweet, she has always been underwhelmed by the most popular dessert: cake.
“Cake is the thing that you're raised as a child in America to be, like, the most exciting, most celebratory dessert you can have, and...it was just okay,’” Tosi says. It’s spongy. It’s dry. It’s usually overcompensating with too much frosting.
When Tosi opened Milk Bar, her now-famous bakery chain, she saw cake as a huge opportunity and decided to reinvent what it could be.
She drew inspiration from a specific frustration she had with the process of making the cake itself. It takes too much time to frost.
In culinary school, she watched expert chefs spend hours polishing the frosting until there was a perfect, glossy finish. It was exhausting, and, in Tosi’s mind, a waste of time and talent.
So, for her Milk Bar cakes, she decided to say "no" to that frosting finish; the cakes would be sold naked. This allowed her to focus on the intricate details that make her cakes a little magical—the cake soak, the crumbs, the filling. Like a doll house, customers can see the inside of the cake, revealing Tosi’s decisions and highlighting those special ingredients.
Think about your industry’s “cake”—the thing that is accepted as “okay,” but has so much more potential. Then, dare to ask: “What if I don’t frost my cake?”
Use your own frustration to inspire looking at something in a new way. What’s stifling your creativity? What could be done differently? How could making that change liberate it from it’s okay-ness?
For my birthday this past April, I decided to order a Milk Bar cake. And I can report: it was different, it was a cake for people who don’t like cake, it was a lot of things—but it was not just “okay.”
~ Natalie, and the Team at Clique Studios
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