(Bloomberg) -- A few months ago, I made a discovery while planning the cake for my daughter’s second birthday party in Brooklyn. It’s unexpectedly hard to find a good, creative bakery that doesn’t overdo it with artificial color and flavors. Even in a city as big as New York.
I took to Instagram for recommendations. Almost all the resulting suggestions were for small artisanal bakers who sell products via social media. I had no idea New York had such a vibrant underground cake scene. There are multiple desserts I’d choose over cake—including pretty much any of the incredible laminated pastries from Radio Bakery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—but I was blown away by these bakers’ products. It’s a good time to get excited about cake.
Just look at how diverse the world of cake can be, from Dacha 46’s ethereal 10-layer eastern European honey cakes to Paige Nickless’ intensely moist, exotic-ingredient-layered gateaux. I am already looking for an excuse to order another one. Or two.
These artisans also highlight how much the traditional bakery formula is changing in the Big Apple. Most of this generation of indie cake makers, a mix of professionally trained and self-taught entrepreneurs, don’t want their own place. Recipe developer and content creator Noreen Wasti says she doesn’t want a brick-and-mortar location. “Never. It’s not my dream to only do cake,” she proclaims. Mina Park, who opened the Korean-accented ultralight wedding cake brand 99, says she eventually wants to run a cake studio inspired by Asia’s late-night teahouses. Her potential future project would be open to the public only on weekends and include live DJ sets.
A few things prospective clients should know. First, since some of the following bakers make cakes as a side hustle, they accept only a small number of orders per month. Request as far in advance as possible—one week at minimum. Second, there’s no shipping; these cakes are available only for pickup or, in some cases, delivery in the New York City area. And though several bakers have a menu of cakes, including ByPensa and Dacha 46, most produce bespoke cakes catering to the customer’s preferences.
Below, find information on your new favorite sweet, whether you’re looking for light and airy or rich and indulgent, for a birthday or a gift. Or maybe because you just need some good cake.
Noreen Wasti
For the past three years, self-taught baker, recipe developer and content creator Wasti has been selling her stunning bespoke three-layer cakes—heaped with fruit, herbs and edible flowers—via Instagram. Her complex creations include almond-butter cake layered with Thomcord grape compote, vanilla pastry cream, vanilla bean syrup and pistachio nut crumbs, and finished with a salted vanilla bean and fig leaf Swiss meringue. All her cakes are made with flavorful seasonal jams or compotes, and Wasti typically adds a layer of crunch. She leans heavily into spices and extracts with ingredients such as cardamom and orange blossom, drawing from her Pakistani heritage and time spent in the Middle East.Price: Starting at $250 for a 6-inch cakeHow to order: Via Instagram message @noreenwasti
By Clio
Clio Goodman is the cake world’s Willy Wonka, producing global flavors including a coconut Victorian cake with passion fruit curd, tamarind caramel and hibiscus buttercream, and an espresso-frosting-coated apple upside-down cake featuring fruit caramelized in chocolate and soy sauce. “I’m just really excited about flavors,” says the owner of the almost two-year-old By Clio bakery. Although she sells a variety of baked goods, her signature is a beautiful, shabby-chic, flower-adorned layer cake—she produces about 300 each month. The cakes are crafted from layers of a light sponge, or richer butter or olive oil layers. Filings are as varied as fresh fruit, citrus, sweet-tangy curd and chocolate, enveloped in whipped cream frosting.Price: Starting at $67 for a 6-inch cake How to order: Via the website
Dacha 46
Dacha 46, a roving eastern European pop-up run by partners Jessica and Trina Quinn, makes addictive, cloudlike, barely sweet 10-layer Medovik cake. Their signature dessert is made from honey sponge cake layered with whipped dulce de leche mixed with smetana (a rich, sour cream-like dairy product common in parts of Europe) and whipped cream in superthin layers that all melt together. The duo sell several other cakes, including a walnut, vanilla bean and coffee Kievsky torte; all of them are equally airy and representative of old-world Soviet and eastern European confections. They’re “meant to be a fun and playful time capsule,” Jessica says. Price: Starting at $168 for a 12-inch cakeHow to order: Via the website
Ileene Cho
Cho crafts her elegant mousse and sponge French-style layer cakes out of the new American restaurant the Noortwyck in the West Village, where she’s the executive pastry chef. There she serves mille feuille and other plated desserts; the only way to taste one of her superb cakes is to message her. The South Korea native draws from her heritage and leans into seasonality for her modestly adorned, not-too-sweet, cream-filled gateaux. A recent fall confection featured vanilla-cinnamon sponge cake layered with hojicha (roasted green tea) mousse and Korean sweet potato custard with caramel rice crispy crunch.Price: Starting at $139 for a 6-inch cakeHow to order: Email Icho@thenoortwyck.com
From Lucie
From Lucie might be small (it’s in a splinter of space in the East Village), but you can’t miss it thanks to the butter-yellow facade. Lucie Franc de Ferriere, a native of Bordeaux, France, specializes in whimsical, flower-adorned cakes whose flavors change seasonally. The confections blend American-style sponge cakes with French sensibility and ingredients: carrot cake with fromage frais buttercream, and a lemon olive oil cake with lemon curd and lavender Swiss meringue buttercream, for example. Despite her simple yet artistically elegant aesthetic, Franc de Ferriere is a self-taught baker. After losing her art gallery job during the pandemic, Franc de Ferriere began baking out of her Lower East Side apartment, selling cakes at Sunday to Sunday, her husband’s nearby American restaurant. The cakes were so popular, she opened her own business almost two years ago.Price: Starting at $9 for a slice and $80 for an 8-inch cakeHow to order: At the bakery or via the website
Paige Nickless
Nickless, @FremeCraiche on Instagram, specializes in layer cakes that are unexpectedly juicy, like perfectly ripe summer fruit. The baker, a veteran of Major Food Group’s the Pool and other restaurants, takes a chef-y approach to her desserts, constructing three- or four-layer chiffon cakes that balance acidity with salt and richness, with a light hand with the sugar. Her unconventional frostings and fillings, typically swirled with a seasonal jam, jelly or caramel, incorporate lesser-known ingredients such as cupuaçu, a cacao-esque Amazonian fruit. Her abstract designs hint at the cake’s flavors: An almond-semolina chiffon with yogurt mousse, spiced cardamom apple-butter swirl and rose water buttercream is decorated with caramelized almonds, dots of the spiced apple butter and edible flower petals.Price: Starting at $100 for an 8-inch cakeHow to order: Email fremecraiche@gmail.com
99
Mina Park’s lacy, romantic cakes—most decorated simply with piped cream and fruit, some using a Victorian frosting technique for an icy exterior look—are a flashback to a bygone era. Her cream and yellow genoise sponge-based cakes are ultralight and barely sweet, designed to highlight the seasonal filling inside, whether summer corn or Korean sweet potato. The flavors are clean and concise, sometimes referencing recognizable Asian desserts such as Korean yakgwa, a deep-fried, chewy, cookie-like confection flavored with ginger and honey. Park, who relocated to New York about four years ago after working at Tartine Manufactory in Los Angeles, bakes out of her Brooklyn apartment. Her specialty is wedding cakes; when she has time, she releases a limited number of cakes on her website.Price: Starting at $300 for a quarter-sheet cakeHow to order: Via her website or email hi.ninetynine@gmail.com
ByPensa
Tell your wildest cake dream to Nikki Pensabene, and she’ll make it a confectionary reality—an intricate chess set, a fairy-style mushroom house, the most elegant of wedding cakes. Baking was a side gig for the former Roberta’s chef until 2017, when she resigned from the restaurant world and made it her full-time job. Pensabene’s small cake studio in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg is open by appointment only for customers who can sample a rotating list of flavors, such as her signature Champagne sponge cake accented with strawberries and a rose water buttercream. Each high-rising cake has tiers of four frosted layers and is covered in smooth, silky Swiss meringue buttercream. Price: Starting at $105 for a 6-inch cakeHow to order: Via the website
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