Enchanted Cakes: Three Cake Witches Channel the Unexpected

The enchanted cakes on display, photos by Carolina Korman

Outside, on a day threatening rain, three pastry chefs have set up cakes that defy traditional shape, color, and size. Both the cakes and their makers — Michelle Boulos, Rose Wilde, and Kassandra Mendieta — are covered in glitter. The scene is resplendent: dahlias, delphiniums, hellebore, and roses either pepper the cakes, the table or ground. Rose stacks disks of vanilla meringue on top swirls of butterfly pea blossom whipped cream with the speedy grace of a potter at her wheel. As they dance to Fleetwood Mac or exchange tips on how to use an edible ink printer, they’re playing; they’re collaborating. Originally the three met through Instagram, but now they chatter about misunderstood ingredients and elusive beach plums with curiosity and authority, like witches adding to their cauldron.

Kassie Mendieta, Rose Wilde and Michelle Boulos

Baking is magic, though I wouldn’t be the first to say so. The alchemy that transpires when a baker combines flavor, technique, ingredients, and imagination is a kind of ethereality that, by its nature, is gone as quickly as it is experienced. While plenty of people can make a mean cake, there is a buzzing network of women pastry chefs throughout Los Angeles. This “coven of cake witches,” often work independently from a restaurant or bakery, take orders online and make cakes unique to their tastes. Long gone are the standardized sheer-edged red velvets and vanilla of weddings and birthdays past. These are cakes of wild swirls and geometric experimentation, at times with flavors more likely to be found on a savory menu. Some call them “Instagram” cakes but reducing them to an internet trend cheapens the intimate process of this type of cake-making, what it is working against and promoting. These defiant cakes are, as Michelle puts it, “rooted in care,” and driven by individual perspectives on food, celebration, and design.

“I just think cakes are mirrors of ourselves, like our best moments. All the memories,” Rose says.

Michelle agrees. “They’re an archive of memories that we’re pulling from. Like the flavors, everything.”

“Us being the people creating it,” Rose continues. “They’re very much mirrors, cause it’s like this is something that is inside of you that you created.”

Let’s apply some cake magic logic here. If cake is an extension of the baker, while also intended for someone else, then could the cake be an intrinsic confluence of creator/creation/recipient? A kind of communication? Michelle, Rose, and Kassie all have something to say. Each of them has crafted a personalized path into their cake witchery, and their individual philosophies driving their practices are all very far from wanting to make a “perfect” cake.

Michelle Boulos’ Purple Pansy Spectacular cake

When Michelle Boulos was quarantining, she started her day by creating elaborate oatmeal bowls. A basic oatmeal-as-food canvas translated into making cakes, and before she knew it, @nogoodcakes took off. Michelle is funny and poised, and eager to channel into her cakes the same surprise and playfulness that fed her oatmeal creations.

Michelle’s mugwort-infused cakes, papered with mushroom drawings printed on edible paper, have roasted soybean powder pastry cream and an avocado-honey buttercream. I can see how the jelly pools at the bottom of the cakes are a nod to the ice rinks she used to frequent as a kid: “I was a competitive [figure] skater for ten years…I used to watch when new ice would get laid down, when it’s fresh, it’s transparent, it’s almost wet but not, and you can see your blade cut into the surface. I was so in love with that, and I’m still obsessed with it now,” she says, acknowledging the surprise of never knowing where ideas will come from.

Boulos’ mugwort-infused cake with mushrooms printed on edible paper

But Michelle loves to work without a plan, anyway, tackling her cake design on the fly. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t consider each cake deeply. When I ask her about the printed mushrooms on her mugwort cake, she says that she knows little about the mushrooms, but then articulates her fascination with them: She loves the idea of mycelium connecting living things and “that when you see a mushroom, you just see the fruiting body and there’s actually so much more to it. It’s a very fleeting part of the mushroom…. I didn’t know that there was this whole vast underground network that is so intelligent and expansive and engaged with its environment.”

That kind of network is apparent in the sharing of knowledge between the bakers too, an element that is essential to any coven. Michelle, who started baking at home, says, “Even when you learn things at home, you’re still learning through a network of people. When I’m using a tip that Rose posted about, I’m learning from her.”

Kassie works by mood. “In a day where I have seven cakes [on order], the first cake, the fifth cake, and the seventh cake all look completely different based on how I’m feeling in those separate moments,” she says. She might be inspired by the music she’s listening to or the natural folds of the buttercream. “I let the cake tell me how she wants to be decorated,” she says.

Kassie’s process echoes that of her artist grandmother, who would dedicate herself to different art practices in waves, switching from paper beads to painting to drawing every few months. For Kassie, who before starting @ibakemistakes worked in bakeries in L.A., San Francisco, and San Diego, being influenced by mood and what’s in season allows for every cake to be one-of-a-kind. Like her website tells customers, any cake can be a wedding cake — it’s up to how you want to celebrate yourself.

“My thing is, you don’t know what you’re gonna get until you get the cake,” she says. This in-the-moment model is one that big name bakeries don’t often embrace. For Kassie, it provides a freedom and sense of fun that can easily get lost in a bigger restaurant.

Her cloud-like cakes for the photo shoot host a complex combination of flavors under the swoops of olive oil Swiss meringue. The base is a rose water and Noyaux[3] [4] (an extract from the apricot pit) buttermilk cake, layered with raspberry bergamot jam and mascarpone whip. The Noyaux extract “kind of tastes almond-y, but a little bit like Fruity Pebbles,” Kassie says, which makes sense as she draws inspiration from childhood comfort foods. This desire for comfort, she thinks, is also what renewed people’s interest in cakes during the pandemic. Combine nostalgic banana-milk cake with a spectacular flower display, and you have the makings for joy.

“Food is everything,” Rose says. From our conversation, which spans the xenophobic “othering” of unfamiliar ingredients to the challenges of the U.S. food system and our relationship with health, it’s evident that food can teach us a lot about where we’re at. Though she never uttered the word political, it’s hard not to think that her cakes are radical attempts at disrupting a broken food system.

Wilde’s meringue mushrooms, raspberry shrub gummy worms, and rye chocolate cupcakes

Drawing from the unexpected is its own kind of enchantment, and Rose’s baking channels her diverse background. After finishing law school at UCLA, Rose worked in human rights, but found the “level of violence” in the cases she encountered affecting her. Cooking was a way to “fill her own cup” while helping other people. As her homemade bread gained momentum, she “applied her education on comparative international systems to comparative food systems,” and started her company Red Bread in 2011. A brick and mortar operated from 2012-2014 before Rose went on to lead pastry programs at some of L.A.’s top restaurants.

When Rose reopened Red Bread in its current micro-bakery model in 2020, she asked herself, “What if I could go back to [my younger] confidence level with what I’ve learned and no longer feel like I have to fit myself into a box for a headshot? And I was like, oh, I want to put more vegetables on cake. Fruits and flowers and roots are already sweet. I try and teach people that you know, our version of sweets in this country is just sugar. But it doesn’t have to be that way because we have ingredients, and it is our choice how we build them.”

Her domed Makrut lime chiffon cake, complete with whipped cheesecake mousse and fresh strawberries, and a yuzu matcha buttercream studded with chicory and celery leaves, exemplifies her “Cake is Salad” ethos.

“I’m very much trying to have enough of something that you feel comfortable with so you’re willing to try it…and then once it’s in your mouth, where you can’t overthink it…that’s where I hope the [cake] proves itself,” she says.

Throughout her process, she focuses on balancing flavor, technique, and structure. Rose, who grew up partly in Ecuador and has traveled extensively, considers flavors and food systems that are unfortunately ignored here, like bitter or sour flavors. “When I introduce an ingredient that people may not know, I try really hard not to label it as other or foreign,” she says. And always, she strives for abundance: “Everything is good for you,” she says. Rose believes that her fellow pastry chefs are “trying different things and sharing their knowledge without gatekeeping [as] a return to this sense of magic and abundance.”

Witches bewitch, they fascinate, they charm, but they always have a purpose. Though Rose, Kassie, and Michelle have distinct cake voices, they echo each other. They honor every ingredient; they strive for a sense of plenty. Within their honey buttercream towers, their flavors of Makrut lime and Noyeaux, these three are asking us not only to return to childhood and delight, but also to consider the inner workings of nature. Not to mention, they are always there to lend each other cake board in a pinch.

Thankfully, the rain spares us, and the cakes sit together in happy company. We dive into the meringue tower, messy smears of blue whipped cream on everyone’s plate.