Karen Cuneo and her sister Grace Cuneo Lineman have always had a few shared interests: They've enjoyed baking, working in food, and each other's company. But it wasn't until a chance pun two years ago that they realized they could actually combine the three. Empowdered Sugar, their first cookbook-slash-real project together (it drops September 17) is a culmination of all of the above—a love of baking tinged with family-friendly fun and finished with a buttload of rah rah! girl power.
The result of all the above is 233 pages of punny recipes, all of which correlate to a different female superstar: Joan of Bark, Whoopie Pie Goldberg, Gloria Esteflan, Lilly Pulinzer Cookies, to name a few.
"The first recipe we came up with was the Beyoncé BeyHive Honey Cake," Grace, who works in the consumer product goods industry, tells Delish. From there, it was Karen who came up with the idea to combine their untapped potential with puns with their desire to uplift women into a larger project. "I put my two loves together here," Karen (a longtime food scientist) adds: "baking and strong women."
From there, the project came to life pretty seamlessly. Karen used her intimate knowledge of food to take on the primary baking role; Grace became Karen's "number-one taste tester" and lent her marketing brain to puns and packaging. They recruited their cousin (who has a small design following on Instagram) to illustrate each heroine and her corresponding recipe. The rest of the book was seen through with an entirely female staff of taste-testers and editors.
But the R&D process wasn't entirely without difficulty or a learning curve. "A lot of this book is about women who accomplish things through hard work, and the one recipe that gave me a lot of trouble was making a really easy, approachable King Cake," Karen explains. "I had to make that recipe a lot of times. I just kind of felt like 'this is my hurdle to overcome.' [That] 'Billy Jean King Cake' is now my favorite recipe."
Meanwhile, other recipes came easier. Karen was listening to Missy Elliott on a run and boom: Missy Elliott Shoopa Doopa Fly Pie was born. Shonda Rhimes TGITiramisu was the product of Thursday binge-watching. The list goes on and on.
The project also took on a "funny irony" for the sisters, Grace notes. "Baking can sometimes still seem very 'women belong in the kitchen,' but we always found it [to be] a way of expressing ourselves and creating community with other women." The process behind the book—the brainstorming, the baking, the testing—all happened in kitchens with other women and provided the Cuneo sisters "solace" during an otherwise trying time (like, you know, all of the fun things women have to deal with in The Year of Our Lord 2019). And that comfort fueled them.
"Grace has always said the one aspect of getting an idea to come to life is a sense of urgency," Karen says. "It’s something she’s preached to me every time I’ve had a big idea or ambition, and we both felt that way for this—we felt a sense of urgency to get this book into the world."
The women are preparing for their cookbook to come out by exploring the food communities everywhere on the internet—they are pretty new to them (as experts and published authors, at least), after all. And if it all works out, they'll be making a lot more recipes in the near future. Probably Sarah Breedlove Millionaire Bars (pg. 111-112), to be specific.
