The Cake Picnic Criss-Crossing the Nation Arrives in New York

If you were strolling through Tribeca on Saturday, you may have noticed a flurry of people streaming in and out of the event space at 30 Vandam Street perching pizza boxes on outstretched arms high above their heads like servers navigating a crowded dining room.

No, this was not in response to the opening of the latest viral pizza joint. Each of those boxes stamped with the Cake Picnic logo carried upwards of 10…15…25 slices of different cakes, or as many as the box’s bearer could slice in the allotted four-minute rotations they were given to pillage the cake table. This is how Cake Picnic maintains decorum when the child in all of us takes over as hundreds of gorgeous, glistening cakes of all shapes and sizes sit right before our eyes.

Cake Picnic was dreamed up by Elisa Sunga, a UX design manager at Google who has spent her after-hours orchestrating crowd-drawing cake events across the nation for the last year. They’re called “tours” because they really have a fanbase that could fill a concert venue.

Michelle Benedict

Cake Picnic’s tagline also functions as its cardinal rule: No cake, no entry.

Attendees range from home-baking enthusiasts to professional pastry chefs. They can bake their own creations or buy one from a favorite local bakery.

Rita’s Bakehouse flew all the way from Michigan with lemon guava meringue cake in tow. Maya Elia of Dolcetta Baking pulled up with a jaw-dropping dark-chocolate cake slicked in cardamom brown buttercream and topped to towering stature with Cabernet-poached pears. And Tiffany Wang, the home baker behind Little Shop of Nice crafted a picture-perfect ode to Queens with her subway-tiled cake.

Frisco

That New York guy who recently had half his cake allegedly stolen at Quality Meats was there, this time tripling the tiers of his pilfered cookie-studded funfetti creation. In a caption on TikTok, Ryan Nordheimer wrote: “More stressful than the SAT,” of transporting his entry to, what he called, the “cake Hunger Games.”

A perpetual crowd was seen huddling around the “Choulette Royale” from Next Baking Master Paris competitor Paige Nickless, with buttermilk mousseline, strawberry jam-layered chiffon, and chocolate chickory cream puffs. Pausing from professional baking after a whirlwind few years, Nickless still puts on occasional pop-ups in Brooklyn. “This brings me so much joy in contrast to, maybe, the more stressful aspects of pastry. And that’s what makes the whole thing so cool,” she says of Cake Picnic.

Brooklyn’s Radio Bakery came out in full force. Multiple bakers and sous chefs contributed creations to the table, including chef-owner Kelly Mencin with a Concord grape and hazelnut buttercream-coated vanilla chiffon sheet cake. And industry vet Jamie Rothenberg wowed with a chocolate coffee cream cake appliquéd with vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream and cherry jam.

Steph Lau of the Cookbook Club Substack whipped up black sesame chiffon layered with yuzu curd and slicked in pandan buttercream — a triumph that “survived two subway transfers and several sets of stairs in a cardboard box!”

And Mallory Valvano, the creative mastermind behind Party Girl Bake Club drove in from Philly with two full-saturation stunners. Her lime green cake was topped with Seussian marshmallows — deceptive in that it didn’t contain anything green-flavored at all. And Valvano’s second cake, the one crowned with ripply blue icing and glittered cherries? That was an almond sponge with apple caramel and cheddar confetti buttercream. It was one of the first to disappear.

Contrary to expectation, Cake Picnic cakes aren’t always sweet. Some particularly memorable flavor combinations that leaned to the savory end of the spectrum: a tomato and potato cake, one with prickly pear, and a Midori sour cake. These, along with spiced hot chocolate cake, burnt honey almond cake, and brown butter corn cake have all graced Cake Picnic tour spreads.

Sunga’s Cake Picnic couldn’t be more perfectly timed as the jump-off-the-page cake craze crescendoes, reaching new heights across social, and a fever pitch with the launch of Cake Zine in 2022 and its subsequent sold-out parties here in Brooklyn. Sunga cooked up the idea after she hosted a wildly successful cookie exchange and a myriad of friends and followers encouraged her to keep going. Community organizing is in her bones. Shortly thereafter, on a sunny April afternoon, Sunga brought just under 200 Bay Area bakers together to feast Alice in Wonderland-style in SF’s Potrero del Sol park. The demand for more events skyrocketed.

Requests poured in for cake picnics to be held all over the country and as far as Argentina, Ireland, and Singapore. So this year, Sunga took Cake Picnic on the road, hitting Los Angeles in June before making her way to New York City. Saturday’s picnic sold out in under 20 minutes, warranting a search for a bigger space to accommodate the 400 anticipated attendees, along with an additional round of ticket “sales” (Cake Picnics are free, save for the ‘one cake per person’ entry fee). Spots filled up in under 10 minutes and left nearly 700 on the waitlist.

Sunga will head back home to San Francisco, hosting the final cake picnic of the year next weekend at the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park to honor its Centennial celebration. The event has already sold out its 900 tickets. After that? “We’ll definitely be going international,” she says. “London has been top of mind, but who knows! We’re just getting started.”