Cuisine
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KING CAKE SEASON
S I N F U L LY S A I N T LY C A K E S W
DE LICACIE S
Bayou Saint Cake
USING SEASONAL INGREDIENTS, BRONWEN WYATT CRAFTS COTTAGE-CORE CAKE FANTASIES
Story by Lauren Heffker • Photos by Alexandra Kennon
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ronwen Wyatt is hesitant to label her small-batch layer hcakes as works of art; simple and striking, topped with thick squiggles or ribbons of buttercream and color-saturated florals, the thirtysix-year-old pastry chef favors the term “craft” instead, a preference that takes her precision into account. Abstract and expressive, surreal and delightedly whimsical, Wyatt’s idiosyncratic cake design has given her New Orleans tiny-bakery brand, Bayou Saint Cake, a signature aesthetic. The chef describes her ideal cake as simple, rustic, warm, and topped with fruit and cream–essentially, it’s a cottage-core cake fantasy, presented with an earnest, imperfect, and indisputable beauty. While Wyatt has carved out a sweet niche in New Orleans for the past ten years and counting, she is originally from 48
Annapolis, Maryland. She moved to the Deep South to attend Tulane University, where she studied fine arts and English, aspiring to a career as a freelance journalist. Following the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina, Wyatt graduated and moved to Portland, Maine in 2007. While living with her brother, Colin, who worked as a chef, she took a job as a line cook at his restaurant to pay the bills. “On one hand, I liked it. And I was good at it,” Wyatt said. “But on the other hand, it’s also that a lot of the time, women in kitchens get shuffled to baking no matter what. It’s like the sexist notion that women are more delicate to touch and are better at making things pretty.” After a two-year stint working in San Francisco, Wyatt returned to New Orleans, stacking her resume with gigs at some of the city’s standout concepts such as Le Petite Grocery, Shaya, Wil-
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la Jean, and most recently, the Bywater’s Elysian Bar, the sister restaurant of James-Beard-nominated Bacchanal Wine. When Wyatt joined the ranks of New Orleans’ hospitality and service industry workers who had been furloughed due to the pandemic, she turned to her side hustle as a source of alternate income, and, as she tells it, “the orders just kept coming.” Posting her cakes on Instagram, she amassed over sixteen thousand followers within a period of less than two years. She’s made as few as seven, to as many as thirty-six, cakes in the span of a single week. From her new commercial kitchen space at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood, Wyatt is slowly scaling her operations from the catering kitchen she occupied before. Even Wyatt herself was surprised by
the speed at which her one-woman operation became a full-time job with an LLC attached to it, a reaction she attributes to imposter syndrome. “The kinds of cakes that I make, there’s a huge audience for them in places like San Francisco, New York, even Chicago. There’s tons of makers who’ve been doing that, like far before I came on the scene. And looking at those markets, I think that sometimes I wasn’t always sure how to play this market.” With so many years in her adopted home, Wyatt understands the sentiment behind New Orleanians’ tendencies to cling to their original recipes; searching for the same doberge or classic berry chantilly or Randazzo’s plain cinnamon year after year. And the city has a league of talented local bakers who have perfected the old favorites, she contends. Wyatt’s level of craft lies in reinter-
