The brains behind the beloved food blog is making the jump from Instagram to bookstores.
It’s 11 a.m. on a summery Friday, and the line at La Cabra in the East Village is mercifully small. The bakery’s air is thick with the smell of cinnamon and butter, with a whiff of city bus exhaust coming through the open door, and Sarah Fennel couldn’t be happier. She’s been wanting to try the Danish bakery’s coveted cardamom buns herself after months of lusting after them online, and as a newly minted New Yorker, this is her first opportunity.
Fennel is perhaps professionally obligated to seek out cult-followed sweets and analyze the hype. You may know her better online as the creator of the popular baking blog Broma Bakery, which earned more than one million fans and followers with crisp, brightly lit photos of nostalgic treats in the latter half of the 2010s. Almost 15 years later, Fennel is writing a new chapter. Her debut cookbook, Sweet Tooth, is out this week, and earlier this summer, she moved from Boston to New York City in search of a fresh place to call home and kick off the next stage in her career. Already, she’s finding inspiration from the variety of cuisines and ingredients for sale close to home, like the delightful discovery of jarred Calabrian chiles at the corner store in her new Brooklyn neighborhood.
Since Fennel is about to embark on a cross-country book tour, I’ve proposed a mini pastry crawl across the East Village to help her get to know her new home. We’ll start at Librae Bakery, a Bahraini bakery blending Middle Eastern style with Danish technique, walk a few blocks up to La Cabra, and then head over to From Lucie to end the day with French-style cake. Even with so much sweet pastry in our future, Fennel has brought something sweet from home: a small bag of apple fritter cookies, slightly squashed but very moist and fruity. The comfortingly moist glazed cookie stands in stark contrast with the expertly laminated pastries on display—a divergence Fennel notes herself. “Things like croissants are so popular here, but I don’t see that many cookies,” she says with a laugh.
This is a story about timing. Baking, of course, is an exercise in counting minutes and measuring flour to the gram. But it is also about being in the right place at the right time: the fertile grounds of the internet in 2010, a place flourishing with the rise of blogging and the bright promises of social media with a new iPhone app called Instagram.
Sarah Fennel, then a homesick 19-year-old sophomore at New York University, began baking her mother’s dessert recipes to feel closer to home and photographing the results as a creative outlet under the blog title Broma Bakery. The blog may have “bakery” in the name, but it was driven by imagery. A keen photographer, Fennel was drawn to a bright style flooded with natural light, which provided the ideal format for documenting her fudgy “inside-out” chocolate chip cookies and chocolate-dipped ginger marshmallows. You probably know this aesthetic well, especially if you’re one of the million people who follow Broma Bakery online today.
It’s a dramatically different food world (and real world), and Fennel is still posting for her fans online. But she’s also releasing something decidedly three-dimensional: Sweet Tooth. Her debut cookbook is a collection of new recipes and some of Broma Bakery’s biggest hits—things like espresso martini cake, “small-batch” blueberry muffins, and an homage to Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. They’re recipes for bakers in pursuit of instant gratification, ones who aren’t interested in seeking out too many specialty ingredients and who maybe don’t own a scale. (Both the blog and Sweet Tooth opt not to include any weighted measurements, a standard of European baking that’s becoming increasingly popular in American markets.
Fennel says she’ll include them in her next book.) “If I’m baking, it’s because I want to eat dessert right away,” she says. “I think that’s how a lot of people like to bake as well, and I don’t think that population is served very well by a lot of the baking blogs and cookbooks that are out there.”
The rise of social media, and the baking blogs that came before it, signaled a shift of power in the food media landscape. People didn’t need formal training or Michelin stars to build a following around their food—in fact, a home baker’s perspective has garnered its own might, as evidenced by the success of Fennel’s peers, like Joy the Baker.
Fennel’s food career began in high school, when she got a job working at Rancatore’s, a small artisanal ice cream shop beloved across Massachusetts for scooping flavors like gingersnap and kulfi scented with cardamom and pistachio. She was admittedly less interested in making ice cream than in hanging out with the “cool hipster kids” who worked behind the counter, but the job ended up exposing her to the controlled chaos of the restaurant industry and the creative satisfaction of making desserts by hand. “I would make the ice cream cakes, and that’s how I started getting a sense of styling and how to make the food look good,” she says with a laugh, reminiscing about pounding ice cream into a giant springform pan, smoothing on whipped cream, and piping out Happy Birthday! “I became the head decorator, with a $1 pay increase, because my cursive was the best.”
After launching Broma Bakery as a Blogspot blog in college, Fennel kept posting on the platform as a hobby while working at the popular Middle Eastern bakery Sofra in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in summer 2011, and then at various restaurant jobs in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2014, burnt out on the restaurant industry, she decided to try and give professional content creation a shot. “I literally quit my job, walked home, and Googled ‘how to make money on a food blog.’ And I was like, ‘I have two months, and then if I can’t figure it out, I’ll go into restaurants again,” she admits. She leaned into her photography background to fuel growth on Instagram, scaling up early on the platform. One decade and more than a thousand recipes later, her bet seems to have paid off.
“At the end of the day, what I do is a business. I’m motivated by seeing the success of something and how we can iterate, change, make it better, and adapt to fill a need in the market.”
A good deal of Fennel’s day-to-day work leading Broma Bakery comes down to analyzing traffic trends and predicting what her audience wants. It’s a skill that’s on display at the table while we’re perched in front of From Lucie, as she geeks out over the addition of thyme in the lemon bar (a small departure from the classic recipe with dramatic results) and how hard it is to achieve the buoyant fluffiness of a cream cheese frosting like the one topping a slice of carrot cake. Talking it out is a big part of the process; Fennel has worked for five years with Sofi Llanso, who she dubs the “COO of Broma,” to help develop and test all recipes.
As the book publishing world, including the cookbook arena, has increasingly turned toward online heavy hitters like Joanne Lee Molinaro and B. Dylan Hollis for sales, it almost seems surprising that Fennel didn’t publish a book sooner. Certainly the offers were there, many times.
“Going from the online space to putting words and photos on a page you can never change…I wanted to be at a place in my career where I felt confident and skillful enough to do it myself, from marketing and sales to photography, recipe development, and writing,” she says. “This book has given me, in a way, a second career trajectory, and being in New York, where I can take advantage of that, is the perfect parallel.” After years of planning and testing, Fennel is on the precipice of her next act. But until then, there are bodegas to explore, and lemon bars to devour.