Between recipes of hojicha tiramisu, brown butter buckwheat madeleines, and a plum-drizzled cardamom cruller, Tanya Bush traces her own coming of age. The narrative cookbook Will This Make You Happy (Chronicle Books) takes place across one flour-flecked year in the Brooklyn-based writer and pastry chef’s life. At 23 years old—depressed, uncertain, and in a stalling relationship—she takes up baking and finds it an act of transformation, in which sugar and butter become another kind of sustenance.
An appetite for life grows as she goes from her own tiny galley kitchen to a Tuscan agriturismo and a Brooklyn bakery. Succeeding in small, sweet flourishes—like mastering a meringue—parallels our narrator’s self-discovery, the book’s 50-something recipes getting more technical as we progress through her story and pursuit of happiness.
Now 29, Bush is a co-editor and co-founder of Cake Zine (alongside Aliza Abarbanel)—a print magazine that uses food as a lens on human behavior and culture. Between that work, her food writing, and her role as pastry chef at New York’s community restaurant Little Egg, she’s cultivated a voice that’s self-assured, lyrical, and honest. Will This Make You Happy proposes that failure—in the kitchen or otherwise—can be delicious.
Below, Bush talks with Vogue about the sweet and saucy narrative arc of Will This Make You Happy, finding comfort and chaos in the kitchen, and desserts she can’t stop thinking about.
Vogue: You’ve just finished off Steak Zine, a one-off, non-dessert-led edition of Cake Zine. How has it been to move from cakes to carnivorous territory?
Tanya Bush: We’ve got an amazing line-up of contributors. We assigned five fiction writers we admire to write pieces from the perspective of a server, bartender, cook, or a maître d’ at the platonic ideal of a steakhouse. Brooks Headley, the chef at Superiority Burger, wrote about what it’s like to own a lacto-vegetarian restaurant in a meat-hungry town. His cookbook Fancy Desserts was very formative for me. Steak Zine also has a marbled cover and is… shaped like a steak!
When did you start asking yourself the question, Will this make me happy? And how did that evolve into the book?
I started baking in the early days of the pandemic. I was unmoored, depressed, and unemployed. The wider cultural sensibility was that baking banana bread could quell our existential malaise; I originally lambasted the idea. On a slew of SSRIs, I didn’t think it would make me happy.
Then I started enjoying the process of making something. I had an anonymous Instagram account called Will This Make Me Happy, and for years I earnestly searched for the answer. I encountered glossy cookbooks presenting the perfect finished product—they weren’t articulating the mess, humiliation, failure, and rejection that felt indelible to the process. Much later, I wanted to write a cookbook with a narrative component that encapsulated transforming the self through the kitchen. I want the reader to experience what this fumbling young woman is going through, and for the recipes to develop with her growing self-assuredness.
Did the structure always present so naturally?
I wanted it to take place over the course of a year, which imposed constraints. One of the reasons I love baking is that there’s room for experimentation and to play within rules.
To me, a cookbook is a snapshot of a moment in time. I wanted the recipes to mirror that with seasonality. They also get increasingly difficult as the narrator—a younger version of myself—gets better. We start with cookies, scones, and fundamentals like pastry cream and browning butter. By the end, we’re making multi-component pavlovas. It’s a coming-of-age story, chronicling time through food.
I loved the chapter on the chaotic olive oil cake-making in Tuscany…
I want to be in dialogue with the failures that bring you pleasure. Failure is inevitable when you’re learning something new. The illustrations build that out too—rather than glossy pastries, they’re old prescription bottles, a tea bag burning a hand. When failure is on display, it tells you it’s okay things don’t turn out perfectly.
Baking has this reputation as chemistry. That was not my experience. I was playing in the margins, messing up, and figuring it out on the fly. I don’t throw away what I fail with—I label it, chuck it in the freezer, and trust I’ll find a use for it later. I like to touch, notice, taste, smell, and adjust the way I do in cooking. I learned mostly on my own and through restaurants, so I created an ethos that works for me. I want people to do the same.
How did you finalize the recipes?
I was testing a lot in restaurants, where oven temperatures differ. Sourcing ingredients is different in a home kitchen, too. I baked at home and worked with a recipe tester. There’s a cruller I perfected using a local flour that’s hard to find—we ended up using whole wheat flour for stability.
The recipes meet people where they are but also push them outside their comfort zone. It’s about empowering home bakers—to trust your own touch and not feel mandated by an oven timer.
You’re working at Little Egg, doing Cake Zine, and you wrote a book. How was—forgive me—spinning all those plates?
I had—forgive me—my fingers in many pies. I wish I’d enjoyed it more—I felt overwhelmed opening Little Egg while in an MFA and running Cake Zine. But I loved the exchange between kitchen and writing. Writing is cloistered; baking is kinetic. If I got stuck, I could bake my way through it.
How has your relationship to desire and pleasure evolved?
The book completes a cycle of a year, and you’re not left feeling like the narrator has conquered everything—because I haven’t. I still live with the same questions: how do I find meaning and purpose? I now believe feeling engaged and rooted in a community is central to happiness. Pleasure versus happiness is a major theme, and we don’t land on an answer.
And your relationship to baking?
I was hungry for pleasure in every domain and thought baking was a route toward that. But I don’t think of baking as pleasure anymore. It’s a job that keeps me in my body and in community—and that’s happiness to me. When I’m done with the book tour, I’d like to find my way back to the pleasure of baking. I’ve lost it a bit through professionalizing it. I also don’t look to one thing anymore to make me happy—happiness isn’t a perpetual state.
How do you balance vulnerability with telling your own story?
I spent years online anonymously. Now there’s a demand for disclosure from memoir writers—we’re hungry for intimacy. I wanted the story to feel vulnerable, but I keep some things to myself, changing names and timelines. I think of following a recipe: You’re inhabiting its writer. I wanted the book to feel both particular and reflective. Everyone has had those crises, crushes, humiliations amid the recipes.
Food media feels like such an exciting space right now.
I’m excited to see what Caper does. The UK feels particularly exciting, where there’s experimentation and a push against the standard cookbook. I think of Rebecca May Johnson’s Midnight Kitchen and Ruby Tandoh’s writing.
Were there any fiction writers that inspired you?
Laurie Colwin was a north star—smart, incisive, anti-perfectionist writing about home cooking. Also The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal, Susie Boyt’s Love and Missed, and The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester is such a joyful, voice-driven play on the form.
Any recent desserts you’d rhapsodize about?
Ouma in Flatbush has a danish with goat cheese and candied citrus marmalade with a cornmeal crumble—it’s a textural marvel.
If I’m out for dinner, I need to know the dessert line-up first and work backwards.
For years, I used to order dessert before dinner. I would literally go to a restaurant and say, “I will have the cheesecake, and then I will have the oysters and the steak.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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