Worship, Death, and Cake (with Whitney DePaoli)

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more.

 

Whitney DePaoli is famous for Sugar and Sparrow, a cake-baking and decorating blog that has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, eventually leading to the bestselling cookbook Anyone Can Cake. But what her cake-loving social media fans might not realize is that before Whitney was famous for her culinary creativity, she led worship bands in church and has since quietly written and released music in experimental punk rock bands—and she didn't arrive at any of those gigs painlessly. We talk about the way tragedy affects creativity, reinventing yourself in new mediums, and living in radically different creative spaces.