New York City is not a sweet place. It is not soft, or delicate, or easy to take in. It does not beckon with childhood nostalgia or simple comfort, or act as a panacea—quite the opposite. But, it is a town, nonetheless, devoted to sweets. Like sugar, it is addictive, tantalizing, and decadent, and makes you feel satisfied in a way that nothing (and nowhere) else can.
I can chart each year of my life in New York by the desserts of the time. When I arrived in 2012, Milk Bar was ubiquitous, with its bandana-sporting employees and saccharine treats. I favored the corn cookie, but the (since-renamed) Crack Pie, Compost Cookie, and Cereal Milk soft serve commanded lines out the door. With its homages to the unabashedly cloying flavors of the 1990s, Milk Bar appealed to the Millennials who made up the city’s young professional contingent then—the kids who had breakfasted on Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch and guzzled Gushers while playing 4-Square. Milk Bar began selling “naked cakes”: multi-tiered confections with sides un-frosted to reveal layers of exposed sponge. Having one at an event became an NYC status symbol and naked cakes soon flooded Pinterest boards and event planning materials.
2013 was the year of the Cronut, a croissant-donut hybrid filled with flavored cream and finished with a ring of glaze. So insatiable were NYC residents for pastry chef Dominique Ansel’s invention that Taskrabbits were dispatched to wait in hours-long lines to secure the goods. New flavor releases were treated with the frenzy of a Supreme or Nike drop. Postage stamp-sized Baked by Melissa cupcakes, Dough Donuts, Lady M Mille Crêpes, and Cosme’s corn meringue dessert all had their viral moment in New York City, the originator of food trends. But there was one that started it all: Magnolia.
When Magnolia Bakery opened in 1996 in Manhattan’s West Village, it changed everything. Using leftover cake batter, the owners made cupcakes, which they frosted with sensuous, pastel swirls and sprinkles. They became a sensation. Though it was many years ahead of the rise of social media—back at a time when the word “viral” referred only to disease—the popularity of Magnolia and, in particular, its cupcakes, was undeniable. New York institutions like Sex and the City and Saturday Night Live name-dropped the bakery and tourists lined up to watch their edible souvenirs being decorated. Scores of imitators opened across the country, and suddenly, the only cakes anyone was interested in were muffin-shaped, miniature, and elaborately iced.
That is, until the late days of the pandemic, when I began to notice an influx of cakes on my Instagram feed. Not cupcakes, but true fork-and-spoon cakes—rounds, sheets, and wedges topped with billowing whirls of frosting. These were cakes you could sink your teeth into. Some towered on rotating stands bedecked with flowers, others were over-the-top masterpieces in striking hues, and still more were minimalist and refined. Cake, everywhere. Cake, all around. And many were being crafted in my home borough of Brooklyn.
“Covid did an incredible thing for pastry in the city,” says pastry chef Jessica Quinn, of Dacha 46, an Eastern European pop-up. “There was a renaissance and reinvigoration into what was a really stale and boring pastry world.” For many years pre-pandemic, she explains, restaurants were slashing pastry budgets because they didn’t bring in comparable revenue to savory and beverage programs. The pandemic knocked down barriers and preconceived parameters for Quinn and many of her peers. “During Covid, there were no rules and, as a result, we had true freedom to go out and explore what we wanted to be making and feeding people,” she says.
In October 2020, Quinn returned home from her pastry job at Manhattan’s Rezdôra to find her wife, Trina, in the kitchen preparing the Ukranian-Latvian dishes Jessica had grown up with. Trina, furloughed from her sous chef job at Red Hook Tavern, was devoting her days to tweaking recipes for Eastern European classics like stuffed cabbage and pelmeni (thin-skinned dumplings). Soon, they began posting menus on an Instagram account called @Dacha_46, participating in local pop-ups, and selling homemade delicacies out of their Bed-Stuy apartment. The reception was overwhelmingly positive. Jessica began to recreate the desserts of her youth—multi-layered Medoviks, meringue-based Kievsky tortes, and more—in a trial and error process that involved more than a few Russian baking videos on YouTube. For my own birthday in February, I ordered a Dacha 46 Spartak cake: 10 layers of caramelized honey-chocolate sponge filled and topped with vanilla smetana cream and sour cherry compote. It was as extraordinary as it sounds.
The business, which releases monthly menus of offerings like pelmeni, cakes, and borscht, has also been a way for Jessica to reckon with her heritage as a queer person. Her relationship with certain members of her family has been fraught because of her sexual orientation, but returning to these flavors on her terms has been impactful and, in some ways, healing. Trina and Jessica refer to Dacha 46 as “An Eastern European Queer Jewish Experience” and have plans for a brick-and-mortar spot in the near future.
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Unlike the Quinns, whose industry backgrounds set the foundation for their business, bakers Lulu Prat (@bodega_cakes) and Aimee France (@aimeefrance, formerly @yungkombucha420) initially thought of baking purely as a hobby. Prat grew up in Brooklyn above a toy store owned and operated by her mother. She always had a sweet tooth and began baking at an early age. “My mom always said, ‘If you want to eat it, you can bake it.’” Her first job was at Magnolia Bakery and she has fond memories of eating sugar cookies at Dean Deluca and visiting Italian bakeries in Bensonhurst. During the pandemic, she was studying to become a clinical social worker, baking cakes for fundraisers and events on the side when time allowed. In late 2022, she hosted a party for which she baked 12 cakes, each decorated with a unique aesthetic. Guests were invited to vote on which cake aligned best with the 12 zodiac signs. Images of the ornate creations found their way to Instagram and, on March 1, 2022, @bodega_cakes was born.
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Prat’s style is heavily informed by having grown up in a toy store. A Polly Pocket color spectrum can be seen on many of her cakes, which are often adorned with prominent frosting rosettes, edible metallic accents, and more than a smattering of Maraschino cherries. She refers to the look as “cupid core” (cherub fondant illustrations are another common theme in her work). Though Prat pays just as much attention to the interior of the cake as to the exterior, many of her clients are solely focused on the visual appearance. “They’ll realize at the end of the process, having sent me inspo pics and gone back and forth on the design, that they haven’t shared any thoughts at all on flavor!” she says. While she often suggests more esoteric combinations like buttermilk-chocolate chip with amaro ganache, her most popular requests are for confetti cake with chocolate ganache and lemon-olive oil with blueberry jam—classics with a twist. (To my horror, as a devout chocoholic, Prat told me that relatively few orders come in for chocolate cake.)
Even though she makes multiple cakes per week without ever repeating a design, and frequently turns down new orders due to bandwidth, Prat still doesn’t consider baking her primary vocation. Until recently, she was a course assistant in applied psychology at NYU, and she co-owns and operates a coffee shop in Ridgewood called Honeymoon. “Business is booming,” she says, but having other part-time jobs and revenue streams takes some of the pressure off.
For Aimee France, on the other hand, it’s all cakes all the time. Covid found her at her parents’ home in New Hampshire, finishing up college on Zoom, and beginning to consider her post-graduate plans. She’d been posting food pictures on an Instagram account, @yungkombucha420, which was steadily growing in followers, and returning to a childhood love of baking but through the lens of vegan ingredients. As she chronicled her culinary adventures, her following grew—especially because of an irreverent, Rococo-coded decorating style that, she says, came about by happenstance. “My mom got me a set of piping tips but I just couldn’t get them to stay on the piping bag,” she recalls. “So I just cut the corner off the bag and did my own thing.”
France, who is now a full-time baker (of both vegan and non-vegan goods), takes cues for her decoration from nature, crown moldings, and baroque architecture—“anything that’s really old,” she says. Ingredient-wise, France’s preference is always to explore seasonal produce foraged or found at the farmer’s market. A recent series of pop-ups in L.A. had her so taken with the local citrus, that she immediately got to work on a calamansi lime-pistachio-cardamom buttercream. With 101K Instagram followers, she’s transcended into a cake celebrity, of sorts. But France is used to sharing pictures of her life and, especially, what she’s eating. She spends time each morning responding to DMs and has an open dialogue with many of her followers, sharing tips and insights.
For some, though, grappling with this newfound notoriety can take some getting used to. At first, Clio Goodman, of ByClio Bakery in Gowanus (19.4K followers) kept forgetting she’d reached a threshold of Instagram fame. “I’d just post stuff,” she says, “and then remember—oh wait, people are actually looking at this!” Her first business, Puddin’, opened over a decade ago, when social media didn’t have quite the grip on the food world that it does today. It was a partnership with her private chef clients who believed her puddings would be a hit with New Yorkers. They were right. But, the parameters were limiting. “Americans feel so nostalgic about pudding, that you can’t really deviate too much with the flavors,” she explains.
By 2021, Goodman was ready to experiment with other desserts. Using global inspiration like Thai iced tea and yuzu, she began baking cakes. Three months and some boosted Instagram posts later, she had a business. In January 2023, ByClio, a bakery and coffee shop peddling cookies, brownies, and, of course, cake, opened in Gowanus. Goodman’s decoration style is far less central to the process than some of the other bakers I spoke to—in fact, she’ll ensure customers can have whatever fillings they want as long as she can dictate the frosting (with some suggestions and requests, naturally). “I focus less on how perfect it looks and more on the experience you’re having with the cake and how you relate to it,” she says. Her confections are beautifully frosted, of course, and covered with edible flowers, but the alchemy really comes in the unexpected flavors themselves, which are dreamt up by Goodman (think: coconut-oolong with blackberry filling or watermelon cake with lime curd and guava frosting) or in close collaboration with clients. Goodman embraces any and all requests and specifications—particularly impressive when you consider that in March alone, she and her team made more than 200 special order cakes and, as wedding season approaches, those numbers are only increasing.
In addition to being an important catalyst for the launch of these businesses, the pandemic and its aftermath also created an environment where people have begun ordering more cakes, according to the bakers I spoke to. Weddings and birthdays are popular occasions to celebrate, of course, but each cake-maker receives many “just because” orders. People are more open to indulgence, says Prat, and want to memorialize all sorts of moments in a beautiful way. But also, if we’re being honest, they want to post on Instagram. Forkfuls of frosted sponge may be fleeting, but a grid post of your birthday or engagement or divorce cake lasts forever.
Orders ebb and flow with the seasons, but most of the bakers are so booked up that they turn down inquiries regularly. Instagram is integral to their business (all of the accounts have well over 10k followers) and many work with brands and corporate entities. But, unlike so many cutthroat industries particularly in New York City, the Brooklyn baking community is a close, supportive one. If clients are interested in a cake design that’s outside the aesthetic realm or bandwidth of the baker they’re speaking to, each told me, they’ll happily refer them to someone else.
In a few weeks, I’ll be leaving New York City for good. After 12 years of living here and a thousand dessert spoons licked, I’m leaving. I’m not clear how I’ll fare away from a city where a sweet treat is available at every corner and bakeries deliver on Seamless and Uber Eats with a moment’s notice. But, for now, I’m just focused on the most important part of the move: figuring out my goodbye cake.