Multi-layer Graphene

On how becoming a science journalist allowed me to be forever curious

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.

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MULTI-LAYER GRAPHENE*

Note: I wrote this essay back in August with vague plans of finding it a home elsewhere, but the last few months have felt like a big expansion in the scope of my reporting (from breaking news about mysterious miracle materials to learning about cannabis research) and a growth in confidence that I have in myself as a journalist, so it feels appropriate to share it here now. If you have been a reader for a while you may have witnessed some of my transition into journalism, which is the story that I lay out here, in real time so it will not be fully unfamiliar. Yet, I believe in the value of periodically taking stock of where you are and revisiting and shaking up old narratives - especially if they are the stories you told yourself about yourself.

Recording the New Scientist Weekly podcast where I am on occasional guest.

It is the beginning of my day and the man on the other side of the screen is telling me that empty space is not actually empty. Now, I know that empty space is not actually empty, and he knows that I know that empty space is not actually empty, but he is excited anyway. And so am I. 

Even successful scientists sometimes talk about this empty space issue as if it was just something we say to make theories work and not the physical truth, he says. This is the way it was taught to me in graduate school, I say and his eyes flicker with what could either respect or shock. When we finish talking, both of us say that it was great to get to discuss this kind of fundamental science.

I am a science journalist, which is why I am calling people to ask about empty space. But I used to be a scientist, which is why I already knew that it is not actually empty. The throughline between the two is exactly in the excitement of finding that knowledge.

The theory about empty space has to do with precision and certainty. At the quantum level, which is the level of the very small, perfect precision and perfect certainty are not possible. This means that a measurement cannot turn up a zero, or perfect emptiness and nothingness, because that would be illegally exact. Space that does look empty is actually filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles which repeatedly flicker in and out of existence.

Physicists have been thinking about this since the early days of quantum theory and in the 1940s they started to understand how to coax the phenomenon into revealing itself in experiments. Now, on a sweltering New York day in 2023, I am writing about it because a group of researchers found a new way to use the fact that empty is not actually empty. They say that this empty-not-empty space, alongside some laser light, is a key ingredient for building an exotic kind of a computer. 

Explaining this to my editor feels silly. But getting to the bottom of thrillingly odd statements like “people are trying to build a computer out of light and nothingness” is exactly what constitutes the bulk of my job.

***

I have wanted to be a physicist since I was in the 7th grade. At age 13 the idea that a handful of symbols and equations could capture the what’s and why’s of the very tangible world around us amazed me enough to change my life. A week into my first physics class, I resolved to give my all to pursuing this kind of study as far as I could. 

Typically, physics is taught in layers. First, the layer of big and warm things that you can hold in your hands, like balls that roll down inclines and grandfather clocks that predictably swing back-and-forth. Then, the layer of the somewhat invisible, like electromagnetic fields that fill the space around us, but we do not always see them, and many stories about light traveling through the cosmos extremely quickly but getting bent by water and glass. Then, finally, the extreme layer, the extremely cold and the extremely small of quantum physics, the extremely large and distant of astrophysics, and the extremely fast and energetic of particle physics, the kind that you need giant colliders for. 

Peeling back each of these layers taught me something new that would sound like nonsense, or maybe a fever dream, when mentioned at family dinners, but exhilarated me anyway. These ideas, theories, and accounts of famous experiments convinced me that our physical reality was so big, rich and complex that I could never get bored of trying to understand it. Physics seemed to be extending a promise to me: there would always be another layer to peel back.

Recently, when I called a scientist to discuss an experiment that involved tiny wires and oddly behaving electrons, he unwittingly confirmed this old belief of mine. There is no one big definitive moment of discovery for anything, he said while avoiding the very definitive questions that I had to ask him in my role as a journalist. He said that there are only small moments of progress that different people make at different times and we come to know things through their continuous accumulation. But really, he assured me, another small moment that may both deepen and challenge our understanding is always around the corner.

I have always wanted that, that slow but persistent accumulation of new understanding, the drip of insights that eventually let you splash around in a puddle of knowledge. I never thought that I would discover a star, a species of fish, or a mathematical law that could carry my name and be lionized in textbooks. I just always wanted to understand a little more, like with empty space not actually being empty, where I knew some facts but reporting on experiments that used it deepened my understanding.

***

In the 9th grade I read a popular science book that told me that every piece of matter, every chunk of stuff, is actually a wave. In college, I heard a professor explain that if you put a lot of atoms into a small box devoid of air then shoot lasers at it, you can force them to reveal this wavy nature. In graduate school, I stood in front of a committee of professors, backed by an enlarged Power Point slide and said, confidently, that the equations floating by my head described what a collection of such ultracold, wavy atoms would do if you sent them into space. 

A few years later, someone did. They minimized the box and the laser then integrated them on a chip and sent the chip to the International Space Station. The experiment was not perfect. It did not exactly match with my calculations, but is sort of rhymed with them. I read about it in a scientific journal and felt overwhelmed - here was another way of knowing physical reality, another layer peeling back, and I had had a hand in it. Whenever New York skies get dark enough to reveal the stars, I tell myself that I will learn how to differentiate the space station from all of them soon.

With a deep faith that I will one day be able to point to more than one corner of the world and say “I think I get something about this,” the teenage me resolved to become a physicist before I really understood how to do so. First, I tried to divine what my plan should be by taking many physics classes and reading many books about physics. But most historical physicists that I thus encountered were not obvious role models as many of them lived long ago and most seemed to have lived lives that had little in common with what mine was shaping up to be. 

Unlike the many male heroes of classical physics, some of whom hailed from aristocracy, I was a sad kid in a body that I could not always make sense of, living in a small Eastern European town, never even getting an allowance. But I had lots of faith and the kind of drive that small town teachers mistake for a guarantee of success. 

When I was a junior in high school, at a science festival I traveled abroad to attend, I asked a physicist who had given a stunning talk to give me career advice. You must not be a science prodigy, because otherwise you would not have to ask me that, he said dismissively while signing my copy of one of his popular science books. Not letting myself be discouraged for too long, I took inventory of all the famous physicists I knew, noticed that most were professors, and decided that even if I was not a prodigy, I could at least try to also become a professor.

***

Most people I interview as a journalist are professors. Most don’t look like me, but if we stay on a call long enough, we start to sound similarly. Once, a nuclear physicist who helped me a ton with a complicated story about particles that hide inside of particles that hide inside of atomic nuclei asked me whether I had ever considered a career in physics because he liked my questions. He was disappointed when I said that I was trained to be one, just never quite made it. 

Before that training started, I first moved across the world. At sixteen, I left my small Croatian town for a boarding school in upstate New York, chasing a scholarship that would later help me enroll in a high-profile college. I did not enjoy the culture clash and my crash course in language skills and standardized tests was not easy either. But my physics classes felt new and challenging and that kept me going. I could feel my thinking restructure itself with each new problem that I learned to solve and that softened the discomfort of the rest of it. Early in my first year at this school, an older girl bullied me for trying to start a discussion of string theory in class after I read about it in a book. I hid in my room and cried for a few hours then finished the book and requested that I be transferred to a more advanced class which I then promptly aced.

I enrolled in a college where I could take the most physics classes and be held to the most rigorous scientific standard. It was the kind of place where students bragged about being exhausted and overworked. Dedication to a nebulous idea of success and a misplaced valorization of martyrdom was all we could fill ourselves with while our brains were struggling to develop some fuller sense of self. The physics department was not friendly so I had every excuse to buy into this attitude. I told myself that this would all make me into a more resilient scientist. Whenever I was spoken over or looked down upon by male or older peers or the occasional snobby professor, I treated it as just another intellectual challenge. And I added “thick-skinned” to the list of attributes that I thought a physicist must have.

The first professor I approached for lab work and mentoring gave me vague directions and paired me up with an older, male student who had no interest in ever actually collaborating with me. The second told me I did not look like a typical physics student then asked me if I knew how to work any device other than a microwave. I admitted that I didn’t, so he said that I should come back after I learned more about electronics. Shortly after, he hired the man that I was dating at the time, who was another physics student, instead. 

The third, an older woman with such a reputation for being difficult that even undergraduates heard about it, generously entrusted me with a small part of a niche theoretical project. For about two years, I used it as an excuse to learn all the things that were previously labeled as “too advanced” for me. My heart jumped up whenever jargony words I had only read about in popular science books or heard referenced in math classes came up in this new work. I was building a skillset and a toolbox for another level of understanding of the world. I loved it.

I also learned that my new mentor was not a difficult woman, just outspoken and a woman at once. Alongside crunching equations, she told me stories about being treated poorly when she was pregnant and about the unprofessional ways her colleagues responded to her scientific critiques. Afterwards, I would go home and cook dinner for my boyfriend, the one who now worked in that lab that I had previously eyed. He would find time to berate me about not knowing enough about laboratory equipment he was learning to use before berating me about the way I folded towels and washed dishes. 

We graduated at the same time, with the same degree, and the same honors. When he interviewed for a doctoral program abroad over a video call, I mimed a few answers from the kitchen, mouthing the words “hermitian matrix” when he seemed stumped by a particularly mathy question. He was accepted to that program, but I had been offered a spot at a university only a few hours away from our apartment, so we broke up. We told ourselves that the only reason for the end of us was that neither of us wanted to break up with physics.

The last step that I completed in my journey towards becoming a physicist was spending six and a half years in graduate school. Coming in, I was told that I would only have to take a small number of classes for my degree, so small that a year of homework and note-taking and exams would suffice. Three years later, I was still reading lecture notes and happily going to office hours to chat with professors whose expertise I feared that I would not be able to access ever again. 

I wanted to know what they knew, but also how they came to know it, and how I may learn to copy their method of arriving at knowledge. My purported focus of study was in small, cold and tangible things, but I enrolled in classes about invisible fields that stretch through everything, about universes with unusually many dimensions, and about materials whose behavior is determined by what happens in mathematical spaces that had to be abstracted out of them. I never acquired exceptional skills in any of these subjects, but I could hold conversations about them and that was often enough for me. My mind was restructuring again, and certainly being expanded, and I was enthralled again.

***

My research work was also unfocused. Eventually, I stitched together a doctoral dissertation by pasting together three distinct projects that involved space, ultracold atoms, and fidget spinners, respectively. The years leading up to this were socially and financially challenging. I was separated from some of the people I loved the most, I struggled to find community among my peers, and I worked an awful lot just to earn very little. 

I would find myself picking green peppers over red to save half a dollar at the grocery store and worry that I had made some mistake because that part was not in any books about physicists that I had read as a child. I was losing faith in the process. Yet, even on my most anxious days I could go to some seminar and score just a little serotonin by hearing about a new material or computational technique that may lead to a little more understanding of some tiny part of the world.

My dissertation defense felt unreal. I answered a few questions, offered many thanks, and spoke about my work with as much self-assurance as I could gather, feeling like I was sleepwalking the whole time. At the end, when professors were shaking my hand and calling me doctor in a congratulatory tone, I felt fragile, like a newborn animal confronting the fact that the next to-do item on the being alive agenda is getting up and walking away. 

The rest of my life as a professional physicist was supposed to start then and there, but this time my blind resolve to be one wasn’t enough and no big career move awaited me. It turned out, or so it seemed to me, that being employable meant being a specialist and working on something not just curious, but also buzzy and useful. Simply put, turning a curiosity into a career, and a career viable in a world of professionals, capital and scarce resources, required more discipline and savvy than I had ever cared to cultivate. 

***

As science went from being a pastime of aristocrats or a near-religious quest for esoteric knowledge, it brought more people into the fold, but its rules also became tied to economic concerns. To do research you have to secure funding and to secure funding you have to convince someone that what you are doing is useful. The someone’s who may be able to fund you the most exist within the government, the military industrial complex or mildly evil technology companies that love to pose as a benefactor. In any case, they answer to someone too which means that they have to follow timelines and report timely outcomes and check off boxes that you may never even take under consideration.

Scientists themselves have certainly not lost interest in the magic of discovery and the power of curiosity, but to keep their jobs they have to moonlight as project managers and overconfident futurists. My graduate school mentor did not teach me how to write grant proposals, yet that was what she spent most of her time working on. I felt it each time one of them did not succeed. I felt it through how much time and money I was suddenly not able to squirrel away. And I felt it even more when my training presumably ended and instead of being able to get by on being a competent researcher, but a very driven and enthusiastic one, those qualities couldn’t even get me to a short-term postdoctoral position with researchers that I had previously collaborated with. 

For years afterwards, I beat myself up about this, about my lack of focus and my naivete about the academic job market. Then, the most terrible deus ex machina kicked in as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down my university. Me and my shame went into lockdown, to hide from the virus and mourn a childhood dream.

***

In the last month, I wrote about the following: how soft gels develop extremely fast cracks, how an odd material full of lead may revolutionize how we make wires, why gold glimmers when you hit it with a laser, how one swimmer can surf the waves created by another in a race, how magnets can separate different airborne viruses, a safer method for creating chemicals that contain fluorine, making quasicrystals by shaking a box of metal beads, and a robot made of Legos that can speed up the process of making nano-sized machines from DNA molecules. 

This list is not complete, but thinking back on all the conversations I had with researchers that worked on these projects makes me smile. That cracking story? Reporting it taught me that the tip of the crack in a brittle material is a singularity not that different from the center of a black hole. The one about quasicrystals? I never knew that a system that never settles because it is constantly shaken can still do something like crystallizing, sort of like sugar crystals forming in an overly refrigerated cake frosting. The one about gold? It gave me an excuse to think about what exactly happens inside of a tiny flake of something shiny, how particles so small that they are counted in trillions of trillions have to bump into each other to produce something as simple-seeming as a little light.

Being a science journalist is stressful because getting the facts wrong always carries high stakes. But whenever I manage to take a step back from looking at a calendar blazingly red with deadline reminders and close all the windows that involve a button that says “publish”, I am mostly just amazed by how much science is out there and how great it is that I get to immerse myself in it, like a cautious swimmer letting the sea gently cover them with waves.

***

After I was a physicist, but before I was a journalist, I taught high school. Standing at the front of a classroom every day, briefly holding everyone’s attention just because I knew a little more science than they did, put new responsibilities on my shoulders. And it displaced some of my shame. I tried to make it a habit to spend the first week of each class on discussions of what physics even is or why we think science works as a way of knowing the world with young students who were often apprehensive about it. They’d pull out their phones and look up words like “astrophysics” or “particle collider” or “peer review” then scribble notes we’d later use to discuss some more. After we had done enough of that, and we were all roughly on the same page, we’d start learning the equations and symbols that changed my life back in seventh grade. 

It felt surreal to be the person writing them on whiteboards and explaining their meaning over and over again, sometimes until my voice grew weak. As I struggled to find new words for ideas I had started to take for granted, I started to realize that a love affair with understanding the world doesn’t have to end with a few dozen rejected job applications. Not all of my students loved learning physics like I had, and I did not expect them to, but every tiny bit of openness to thinking about the world through the lens of science that they shared with me felt like a reawakening. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a train of thought falling in place for a teenager or see them suddenly solve all the problems that had dumbfounded them mere minutes before, and the world would instantly start to feel more bright. After all, this was the feeling that I always wanted to hoard, and now I was able to nudge others towards it.

I started to take my writing about science more seriously while I was teaching because I had felt that those nudges could really do something if given a bigger platform. My students, who had no idea about this, inadvertently taught me more than any of the editors that took chances on publishing my early reporting. They did not suffer jargon and they could not wait for you to tell them why something is interesting for very long. Saying that something was interesting because scientists think so almost never convinced them to care. They challenged me and whenever we met in the middle I felt like I had learned an awful lot too.

Once, an otherwise quiet student asked me what would happen to the Earth if we removed all the oxygen from its atmosphere. I had no idea, but I tear up when I think of that moment - this sort of curiosity is what throws you into decades of just wanting to know everything and anything under the Sun and beyond.

On the occasional slow week, or a week when we were collectively feeling low because of what the world around us was going through, I would scrap some of my regular lessons and present students with lists of unexpected facts that emerged from modern physics research. Their task would be to quickly learn why these facts are true and how researchers figured them out to begin with, if they were really so unexpected. “Empty space is not actually empty,” would always show up on these lists. In an interview with yet another researcher I apologetically asked the same. 

“I know you must get asked this all the time, but for a very general reader, can you please recap how we know about this phenomenon at all,” I tried. He had a great answer, and he was very quick to share it.

When I finally wrote it all up, one of my editors said it was very me to have found and reported on something that involves deep truths about nothingness. I took the remark as a wonderful compliment, already making space in my mind for what layer of truth I may be able to peel back next.

Best,

Karmela

*Graphene is a material made of carbon just like graphite in old-fashioned pencils or like diamond but the carbon atoms in graphene are arranged in extremely thin layers. In fact they are as thin as possible as they are only one atom tall. While a single flake of graphene already has unusual properties as a conductor of heat and electricity, in recent years researchers have also found that a few stacked layers of graphene can act even more unusually. Bi-layer, tri-layer and even five layered graphene have been shown to be new and exotic playgrounds for electrons and other charged particles which could eventually lead to new electronics and information processing devices.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING

Though I pretty strictly work on the news desk most of the time, I recenlty had a chance to put together a longer piece on the science, or the lack of science, behind how driving under the influence of cannabis is regulated and tested for. While health and biochemistry rarely factor into my day-to-day beat as a physics reporter, I was excited to have a chance to go deep on something new, all thanks to the New Scientist US team pulling together a hefty series on the ever more popular substance. I really enjoyed thinking through how to make quite a few studies and interviews factor into one narrative and I hope I was at least somewhat successful in knitting together issues of medical and social science with public health and technology. Some of what I learned while reporting this story did not surprise me, but the reporting process still left me with a good number of questions about what may happen next in this arena, and that feels as generative as buffing up my interviewing and synthesis skills. 

I also recently wrote about another topic that I tend to shy away from: space. While this is closer to my beat than the science of cannabis, I have interacted with so many great science reporters and communicators that specialize in space over the years that I cannot but be intimidated by the idea of wading into it. But NASA had broken some news about carbon and water having been found on a very old, very far away asteroid, and I was asked to turn around an article about it in a few hours because people certainly do want to know about the building blocks of life hiding in space rocks. I’m grateful to everyone that picked up the phone when I called that afternoon and I am excited to hear what happens with these samples of the asteroid Bennu next.

Finally, my most read story in months was this one on how sperm and some green algae swim very differently than we do, at times even having to break Newton’s law of reciprocity just to not be stuck in one spot. I credit all the many, many clicks that this story got solely to my editor who came up with the incredibly intriguing headline “Sperm caught breaking Newton's third law of motion.”

READING

I am reviewing Liam Graham’s Molecular Storms for New Scientist’s culture section and have been reading my advanced copy quite furiously for the past two weeks. It’s a fairly technical book, certainly not for the most casual and math-intimidated of the readers, but not without moments of intrigue and curiosity. Graham embarks on a lofty undertaking of building connections between how cells work and how the universe works through a fairly abstract genre of physics called thermodynamics. The first 100 pages of the book definitely made me think that I had underestimated this discipline’s reach when it was first taught to me in college and I am looking forward to thinking about it some more.

This absolutely enraging ProPublica story by Anna Maria Barry-Jester on how a big pharma company used technology that was developed with the aim of vaccinating the most vulnerable against tuberculosis to not only not do that but finalize a drug that can be more easily marketed to affluent people dealing with a less deadly condition instead.

My colleague James Dineen on why trees in cities die young and what that might have to do with microbes in the urban dirt.

raechel anne jolie reflecting on 20 years of being vegan or almost vegan in different ways. While we end up in somewhat different places concerning our relationships with food, reading about jolie’s arc and especially her struggles with orthorexia in graduate school really resonated with me, as did the call for less black-and-white thinking and kindness above purity. The section that hit me the most was the paragraph below where she simply lists all the things that food has been for her, elegantly illustrating both the complexity, the weight and the richness of the subject.

“What this long reflection on my eating choices reveals to me is that I have, at different points in my life, and in no particular order, cared deeply about the following: animals; a feeling of belonging in subcultural spaces; the environment; worker justice; having fun; feeling pure; feeling light; being thin; pleasure (from either indulging or withholding); god, the gods in everything; being flexible and socially adaptable; being boundaried and principled; the ecological crisis; non-harming/ahimsa; being boundaried around what does and doesn’t feel good in my body; not supporting the meat and dairy industry; not supporting food that requires fuel and plastic to get to me; eating local; giving my money to local farmers and local businesses; the romance of breaking proverbial bread over any food as long as it’s shared with comrades; macros; sacrifice; joy.”

LISTENING

My best friend turned me onto Chappel Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess then almost immediately made plans for us to go see her perform live at Brooklyn Steel. It is probably beside the point to debate whether Roan’s music is good because she is here to be a pop star and put on a pop music kind of show for people who like to be a little tacky in that pop music kind of way. For sure, she is a talented performer and hearing her play with a live band made me think that she could tackle other genres if she wanted, but what she seems to want to do is reference her favorite queer inflected pop hits from the last decade or two and hang out with drag queens. The record itself has it all, influences ranging from Lady Gaga and Kesha to Dolly Parton and Toni Basil, and Roan is in no way naive about it - in fact, she is absolutely having fun with it. 

In a completely different category of excellent performances, we saw the remastered re-release of the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in an actual movie theater and I was truly blown away. I used to dislike new wave music quite a bit, but have come around to it over the years and the number of times I had put this record on at work may as well be the peak of my new wave renaissance. Everything about it simply works, from the sequencing to the highly intentional and very campy choreography, to mostly funky, but sometimes also pretty heavy song arrangements. Seeing it on the big screen and in surround sound only solidified this for me, Jonathan Demme’s masterful direction making it look as much as the most unhinged amateur theater production and a missing scene from Mulholland Drive all at once. (This episode of the Big Picture podcast first tipped me off to the movie having a theatrical run and I found the hosts’ discussion of it both exciting and informative.)

I finally finished reading Harry Sword’s Monolithic Undertow, but the playlist of drone-influenced or drone-inflected music that I put together while reading it remains very long so I am still working my way through it. Recent stand-outs are the early Sonic Youth records, Coil’s dark yet operatic industrial effort Love’s Secret Domain, the 1992 compilation album Artificial Intelligence by the record label Warp which is electronic dance music that you do not have to dance too, and E2-E4 and Inventions for Electric Guitar by Manuel Göttsching which share some virtuosic guitar DNA with classic rock and everything else with minimalist composers and what would later be called electronica. 

WATCHING

My partner and I managed to snag tickets for the very last showing of Michael Mann’s Ferrari at the New York Film Festival and it made for a fun night at the movies. In many ways, the film is exactly what you’d expect from a director famous for Heat: incredible driving scenes, unhappy men, over-the-top characters that barely make it past being a trope, a star-studded cast that is trying really hard, odd moments of graphic violence, immaculate aesthetics and a strong feeling of “this is ridiculous” while you also cannot look away. 

We also watched the much smaller budget production that is the alien horror flick No One Will Save You. I did not necessarily like this movie, but I respected its commitment to its choices and it was for sure interesting to spend an hour and a half with a solitary character that barely speaks and still understand her emotional evolution in a very visceral way. Director Brian Duffield could probably make a really thought-provoking horror blockbuster if he got his hands on some more movie making resources.

Finally, we finished Ashoka and while the first few episodes, which were slow, and the finale, which was rushed, did not fully wow me, the middle of the show did and this, for me, justified watching the whole thing. It was exciting to feel emotional about bits of storytelling that connect old and new characters and to revisit themes that have always been at the core of the franchise like characters confronting their heroes’ and teacher’s mistakes or letting go of their own hubris. Of course, having seen so much of Dave Filoni’s work in the animated Star Wars universe, I was deeply primed to like this show’s deep dive into the titular character’s past and related Jedi lore, but the fact that it did not all universally work for me still says something about Ashoka’s story’s resonances that go beyond easter eggs. The move towards sword and sorcery in space and especially Ray Stevenson’s Shakespearean warlock performance were really interesting and refreshing to me (I love seeing a star destroyer class ship, but running down hallways filled with stormtroopers does get old) so I do hope there is more coming down this particular content pipeline. Maybe in season two we can just have better makeup and a little more room for characters to actually talk to each other about dramatic events that brought them both together and apart.

EATING

It’s been a month heavy on vegan cake baking. I pretty much sold out during my latest stint vending at a vegan pop-up market at the Principles GI Coffee House in Brooklyn which felt really good and made me proud of the cakes I had made. My favorite was the pumpkin cake coated in lime frosting and filled with a raspberry jam because it got the most raised eyebrows but still disappointed no one. 

A friend of mine threw a dinner party because one of their siblings was visiting and the food offerings, ranging from this chickpea escabeche recipe by Alicia Kennedy to vegan birria tacos to the richest, mostly-from-scratch vegan elote, were incredible. Inspired by horchata, I made a coconut cake, frosted it with a cinnamon buttercream and filled it with a vanilla custard. This one was a hit too.

Finally, another friend had us over for early Halloween festivities so I pulled out all the stops, went heavy on chocolate everything and made this whimsically frosted cake for the coolest costumed crowd around.