Frosted San Fransisco Fun

Gwen Carroll
May 22
3 min read

By Winston Chu and Liliana Chai May 21, 2025

The sweet scent of sugar floats over San Francisco’s grassy hills where over 1,000 people have gathered, wielding cakes of every shape and size. As the hours pass, the slices disappear one by one until all that is left are crumbs and memories. This is not an average bake sale. This is Cake Picnic: a deliciously chaotic, cake-for-entry celebration of dessert and community.

Cake Picnic is welcome to all: seasoned pastry chefs, home bakers and even those with store-bought cakes. The rules are simple: each person places their cake on the designated tables to share and in exchange, they get a 12-by-12 inch white pastry box to collect as many slices as they want. Cakes ranged from plain vanilla loaves to elaborate constructions: floral buttercream bouquets, mango-yuzu towers and Earl Grey tea-infused creations. For those with less of a sweet tooth, savory cakes made surprise appearances like focaccia “cakes” and salmon bakes.

The San Francisco Cake Picnic took place on March 29, with attendees bringing a total of 1,387 cakes for the festival, ranging in type, flavor and color. After an hour of filling tables with cakes and another hour of adoration and photos, it was time for the buffet. Attendees were given pastry boxes and split into groups that took turns roaming free and collecting slices of cake that caught their eye. Once all the attendees got their first round of cake, the tables opened up for seconds and then thirds—until there was nothing left behind.

“I want to attend a cake picnic to see the creative and different designs of each cake. I have never baked before, so I would bring an alternative such as a jello cake or a no bake cake,” Junior Faye Ooi said.

Cake Picnic’s founder, Elisa Sunga, originally conceived the idea from a simple, universal craving: to eat a lot of really good cake. In April 2024, she posted her vision for a cake gathering in Potrero del Sol Park on the invitation app Plentiful, prompting hundreds of responses. Since then, the event has garnered widespread attention, touring other cities with large baking communities before returning to the Bay Area this year with even more buttercream than before.

“Cake has always been a symbol to bring people together, whether in birthdays or other celebrations. Even though Cake Picnics may seem silly, they provide an opportunity for people to build meaningful connections,” Freshman Claire Xu said.

The widespread popularity and success of this Cake Picnic could be attributed to the two iterations that came before it—the first being in April 2024 with around 250 cakes and the second being in Nov. 2024 with more than 600 cakes. With each picnic, more and more people became hooked by the event’s combination of bonding and feasting over dessert, causing tickets to sell out quickly. In fact, the $15 tickets for the San Francisco Cake Picnic sold out in less than a minute this year, leaving many cake-lovers disappointed.

In response, the eager individuals who failed to obtain tickets set out to host their own versions of Cake Picnic. Three offshoot festivals were hosted on the same day as Cake Picnic, with the most prominent being Let Them Eat Cake—a potluck style festival intended to remain relatively small in comparison to Cake Picnic. All the festivals featured a myriad of flavorful cakes, including a dog cake at Let Them Eat Cake made specifically to treat attending dogs.

Rather than objecting to the offshoot events, Elisa Sunga, the organizer of Cake Picnic, embraces them with excitement. She loves to see other people hold similar events in different areas because, after all, she can not host them all herself, Sunga said per an SFGATE interview.

But that does not mean she is not going to try: Cake Picnic is going on tour for the rest of the year, starting with London in July, and with plans to visit Los Angeles and New York. Future tours seek to continue globalizing the event, reaching cities such as Mexico City, Manila, Dubai. Slowly but surely, Sunga and other coordinators aim to spread community cheer, happiness and most importantly, tasty cake, across the world.

About the Contributors

Liliana Chai

Staff writer

Liliana Chai is a sophomore at Leland High School. She is a staff writer for the 2024-25 Charger Account. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music, playing piano, writing poetry and sleeping.

Winston Chu

Staff writer

Winston Chu is a junior at Leland High. This is his second year in Journalism, and his first year as a movie columnist. He enjoys speech and debate, watching television series, and sleeping.