The Enchantment of Cake with @nogood_cakes
Michelle with her purple pansy cake, photos by Carolina Korman
I started No Good Cakes with a bowl of oatmeal about a month into Covid quarantine. After a few weeks of spiraling, I started making an experimental oatmeal bowl everyday and sharing pics with friends. I was also baking pastries for fun, thinking I could try to sell them. Then I began a food IG called Nommel Gobble as a way to connect online with other folks who love food in all its forms.
Something in me softened through experimenting with oatmeal. That Summer, I made a cake for a friend’s birthday and dressed it like a bowl of oatmeal– toppings scattered about with syrup on top. Friends started requesting cakes and, by word-of-mouth, people began to reach out. A lot of folks had ideas of what flavors and vibes they wanted or let me choose. For others, I provided flavor profiles and we’d work from there. Custom cake-making took on a life of its own thanks to the support and ideas of many old and new friends. And here we are!
The name ‘No Good’ is from both convenience and irony. My boyfriend, Justin Thye, made me a beautiful logo when I was still going as Nommel Gobble (difficult to pronounce and maybe too goofy). I didn’t want to change it, so I thought of other names that work with ‘NG.’ After a few tries, I landed on No Good and stuck with it. The irony is that (usually) my cakes are functionally “good.”. :)
No Good cakes started as a playful experiment and became a project dear to me. It’s become so popular though that I’ve had to put orders on pause. I’m planning to re-open orders as soon I get my ducks in a row.
Kassie Mendieta, Rose Wilde, and Michelle Boulos
A couple of months ago, Edible LA gathered a ‘coven of cake witches,’ choosing me, and my fabulous friends, Rose Wilde of Red Bread and Kassie Mendieta of I Bake Mistakes. Enchanted Cakes was a DELIGHT to be a part of . The dearest part of cake-making for me is connection. Rose, Kassie and myself had a bewitching time shooting our story with photographer Carolina Korman and writer Sophie Nau.
The three cake witches
Gathering as a coven, we first decided on a way to express our processes in this story. We centered on cycles, thinking it would be fun to celebrate the interdependent ways elements act upon each other. In cake form, this took the shape of desserts inspired by plants, carbon and oxygen cycles: sky and water cycles, as well as soil and the nitrogen cycles. In other words, we went for super blooms, the heavens and mushrooms!
With the cakes I contributed, I mostly channeled water and fungi. This double bubble reflects our planet’s water cycle–dew, clouds, ice, melt–and the small yet mighty mini flowers of early Spring. My tiered square cake is about the extensive and wondrous underground realms of fungi and their mycelium. It was inspired by the writings of Adrienne Maree Brown and the little bit of reading I’ve completed from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. Both cakes were the same flavor: mugwort sponge, injeolmi custard and honey buttercream, flavors inspired by my Korean mom and her favorite rice cakes.
Michelle’s spectacular mushroom mugwort cake