Flower Power

Flower power

Written by Ina Michel Photography by Alison Engstrom

If you take a walk down East 10th Street in New York’s East Village, just past Tompkins Square Park, you’ll come across a small bakery called Brooklyn Floral Delight. Painted in cool tones of navy, aqua and white, it’s a serene and welcoming space with a communal table in the center. But owner Jiahn Kang is no ordinary baker. The petite Korean-born founder has a designer’s sensibility; she has translated her background in fashion, jewelry and graphic design into a genuinely unique visual aesthetic. The icing flowers and plants that grace her signature cakes bear no resemblance to standard birthday cake roses. A student of flora, she specializes in creating lush, layered blossoms like peonies and green succulent plants so realistic they could fool you at first glance. Why the drastic career change? “I was going

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INSPIRED LIVING

through a hard time in my other career. I didn’t feel like I was making people happy,” she says of her days as a jewelry designer. “Cake is different. If you have a special occasion, you buy it and you feel really happy.”

Working with a naturalistic palette of blush pinks, earthy greens and creamy whites, we watched as Jiahn topped a green-iced cake with a profusion of delicate buds and blossoms, painstakingly building each one, petal by petal, out of pure buttercream. “I really like the part where I make the flowers,” she says, smiling. “It’s kind of like painting.” We particularly loved the icing dahlias with their black speckled centers and the ethereal-looking ranunculus. Her cakes and cupcakes are so gorgeous, in fact, that it’s almost a shame to slice into them—almost. We tried a piece of this

self-taught baker’s yellow cake (she makes chocolate too) and it was moist and delicious, the icing thick and buttery but not too sweet.

What’s next for Jiahn? She plans to expand her repertoire to include cookies and other treats so that she'll be able to create entire dessert spreads for parties and special events. In the meantime, the café will be open only on the weekends—the rest of the week is spent filling orders, as the process of piping out the intricate flowers is very labor-intensive. But the results are undeniably spectacular. “It’s not just a cake,” she says of her handiwork. “It’s edible art.”

BROOKLYN FLORAL DELIGHT | 380 E. 10th Street New York, NYTo learn more, visit bkfloraldelight.com

71ROSE & IVY JOURNAL