Alumna Shannon O’Malley Authors ‘Apocalypse Cakes: Recipes for the End’

July 8, 2011 — What do you do when the world’s about to end? Bake a cake, says Shannon O’Malley, New College alumna and author of a new cookbook, Apocalypse Cakes: Recipes for the End. The book, published last month by Running Press, is chock-full of delicious delights and, well, frights.

“We’re doomed. Eat cake,” O’Malley writes in the book’s introduction. “A variety of cataclysmic punishments from God continue to rain down upon us. Obviously, this is the time to eat several entire cakes. Use this book to help you celebrate your time on this earth, for when you look up from your cake-smeared cakehole, the sky will fade ablack, the lakes will blaze aflame, and the locusts will buzz aswarming. Eat now, little heathens: there are no cakes in the apocalypse.”

Photographs by Keith Wilson illuminate O’Malley’s culinary concoctions, including Global Warming Hot Apple Pie, Gay Wedding Cake, BP Oil Black Bottom Cake and Agent Orange Carrot Cake. O’Malley sprinkles social commentary into her recipes with a dash of humor.

“Stir in carrots, fold in pecans. Pour all into pan. Bake for 50 min,” instructs O’Malley in her recipe for Agent Orange Carrot Cake. “Check the weather channel for roving toxic plume. Cool in pan for 10 min., then turn out onto a wire rack and cool.”

“Apocalypse Cakes is cultural commentary wrapped up into curious cake recipes,” explains O’Malley. “Not like I’m some big pundit, but I probably wouldn’t have the critical mind to write such things if I hadn’t gone to New College. Also, New College encouraged me to go off and do my own weird thing — and trust my own direction. It was good training on how to think and act independently, without a lot of hand-holding.”

O’Malley, who says she has no previous baking experience, created the first version of Apocalypse Cakes in 2008 as an eight-page ‘zine printed at Kinko’s and stapled at her ad agency. With urging from friends, she continued the project as a blog at apocalypsecakes.com.

When she’s not baking for the end of days, O’Malley writes for a major ad agency in San Francisco and is a self-described “urchin arts enthusiast.” She received her bachelor’s degree in social sciences from New College of Florida in 2001 and her master’s in advertising from the University of Texas – Austin.

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