Cake is having a moment! That statement might sound ridiculous, considering most of us have been eating birthday cakes and wedding cakes and retirement-party cakes and just-because cakes our entire lives. But if you bop around to boutique bakeries across the country, or just follow them on social media, you’ll see an explosion of creativity and diversity in both cake flavors and design.
Passion-fruit curd! Black sesame buttercream! Earl Grey sponge! The cloying, but coveted, buttercream roses of my childhood birthday cakes have been replaced with modern, artful piping, fresh edible flowers, naturally dyed frostings and colorful, nostalgia-inducing breakfast cereals.
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Last Sunday, I was lucky to attend Cake Party, an event that sold out in three minutes, just before the website was crashed by eager cake lovers. The concept is simple: Everyone attending must bring a cake, the crowd is divided into groups and each is given eight minutes to walk the rows of cakes, selecting as many slices as they’d like. Being in the last group may feel stressful, but there is plenty of cake to go around. If you need a dose of serotonin, I highly recommend standing in a room with 130 colorful, whimsical, adorable cakes!
Just four of the gorgeous cakes. (Hippo Wong)
Cake Party was organized by Seattle’s Zoe Kahn (learn more about Zoe in Taste of the Town, our subscriber-exclusive Q&A) and inspired by Cake Picnic, an event started by San Francisco home baker Elisa Sunga. A few months ago, 1,300 cakes were brough to a Cake Picnic, held on the expansive, lush lawn at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, and after that video went viral, copycat cake potlucks started popping up across the country.
I made a lemon olive-oil cake with a layer of roasted apricot/basil puree and a sour cream/cream cheese buttercream colored with turmeric and freeze-dried strawberry powder. A few days before, I got a decorating lesson from one of my favorite Seattle cake shops – but you’ll have to wait until Season 3 of The Nosh to learn more about that!
Cake feels synonymous with birthday celebrations, but that’s actually a fairly modern tradition. For most of history, sugar was expensive, having an oven at home was rare and flour wasn’t the finely milled powder we’re familiar with today that results in moist, fluffy cakes. To learn more about the history of birthday cake (and birthdays!), listen to the Christina Tosi episode of Your Last Meal.
Listen to the interview I did with the founder of Cake Picnic on a recent episode of Your Last Meal!
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Have a food- or drink-related question (Need a restaurant rec? Have a mystery that needs solving?) Send me a note: rachel.belle@cascadepbs.org
XO
Rachel Belle
