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Everyone should experience the dopamine-fueled joy of standing in a room with 130 cakes, piled high with fruit and frosting, with permission to try a slice of every single one! Last July, I got to do just that after snagging a coveted ticket to Seattle’s first Cake Party, an event that sold out in three minutes and promptly crashed the website.
Cake Party was organized by Zoe Kahn, a Seattle content creator who donated ticket sale proceeds to the Ballard Food Bank. The concept is simple: You must bring a cake, the crowd is divided into groups and each is given eight minutes to walk the rows of cakes, plopping as many slices as they’d like into a bakery box. Being in the last group may sound stressful, but there is plenty of cake to go around. Cake Party was inspired by Cake Picnic, a public potluck dreamed up by San Francisco home baker Elisa Sunga that has since expanded worldwide. Last October, 2,000 people showed up to a Bay Area Cake Picnic with 2,068 cakes to share!
But before I could go to Cake Party, I needed a cake decorating lesson and, in my opinion, nobody makes more creative, playful and beautiful cakes than Seattle’s Paper Cake Shop, owned by restauranteur Rachel Yang and pastry chef Gabby Park. Their Asian-flavored sheet cakes are whimsically topped with frosting swoops, squiggles and splotches in shades of purple (ube), pink (raspberry) and green (matcha) and accented with everything from Fruity Pebbles cereal to guava gel é e and candied hazelnuts.
