The wedding cake may technically be dessert, but these days it is doing far more than showing up after dinner. Across the U.S., cake artists are turning it into sculpture, fashion statement, nostalgia trip and, occasionally, something that barely looks edible at first glance. From translucent jelly creations to baroque piping and avant-garde forms, the possibilities have become wonderfully broad. We’ve rounded up 21 of the most exciting names to know, each bringing a completely different flavor, both on the plate and beyond it.
Deaux Baker
Based in the Texas Hill Country, Pamela Thibodeaux brings a wonderfully untamed quality to the cakes she creates for Deaux Baker. Color comes easily to her, as do unexpected shapes, loose florals and foliage-inspired details that make each design feel almost grown rather than assembled. Her cakes can be playful, sculptural or beautifully pared back, but there is usually something organic running through them, from locally sourced seasonal flowers to palettes that echo the landscape around her. Just as much thought goes into what is inside, with Pamela experimenting freely with flavor combinations to make sure the cake holds its own long after the first impression.
Dream Cake Test Kitchen
You can spot Hyun Jung Jun’s cakes almost instantly: whimsical textures, softly rounded forms and playful, surreal details that make them feel almost too perfect to cut. The self-taught, Chicago-based artist launched Dream Cake Test Kitchen in 2020, translating dreams, remembered landscapes and everyday visual curiosities into tiny worlds of buttercream and sponge. Her approach to flavor is just as curious. Hyun Jung often reaches for unique ingredients such as black pepper, turmeric, and Chinese spices, using savory notes to push sweetness in less expected directions.
Maria Amaria
María Araujo works between Miami, New York, Mexico City and Madrid, and that mix of places naturally finds its way into Maria Amaria. Her cakes are often sculptural, but never rigid, with flowers, curved forms and unexpected details giving them a looser character. Nature is a recurring source of inspiration, as are her Venezuelan and Mexican roots. Seasonal blooms and locally sourced ingredients keep each design connected to its setting, while the overall look stays expressive, elegant and full of personality.
From Lucie
From Lucie has become something of an East Village darling, and it is easy to see why. Founder Lucie Franc de Ferriere draws on memories of her childhood in the south of France and her mother’s baking, creating effortlessly pretty cakes with a homespun edge. Seasonal ingredients lead the way, sweetness is kept in check, and locally sourced flowers are arranged with an instinctive, meadow-like looseness. Lucie's signature is a texture-first approach that leaves formal finishes behind in favor of something softer, freer and closer to the wild beauty of an open field.
Eat Nünchi
Who says cakes have to involve sponge and buttercream? Eat Nünchi has built an entire creative practice around jelly. The Los Angeles studio taps into the nostalgic pleasure of a wobbly dessert, then pushes it somewhere much more imaginative with translucent layers, floating motifs and bold flashes of color. Founders Lexie Park and Willy Hu bring backgrounds in fashion, architecture and food tech to the table, giving the cakes a sense of play without losing their design edge. Eat Nünchi's surreal creations have since appeared in collaborations with Skims, Nars, and Saint Laurent.
Lauren Schofield
Lauren Schofield got her start in pastry at eighteen, working as an assistant in the restaurant at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Years spent in New York kitchens followed, sharpening both her technique and her eye before she began creating desserts for private clients, weddings, dinners, and events of her own. Lauren's cakes lean toward rustic European flavors, with seasonal fruit often left to do the decorating, giving each dessert a natural, relaxed beauty that keeps the focus on the ingredients themselves.
Ena Bakery
At Ena Bakery, seasonality is not just part of the menu, it sets the whole rhythm of the bakery. Founded in Los Angeles by pastry chef Sasha Piligian, the microbakery works closely with Southern California farms, turning the freshest market finds into a rotating selection of cakes, pastries and custom desserts. Sasha’s style is understated and ingredient-led, with herbaceous notes, thoughtful sourcing and flavor combinations that let each season come through clearly. Made for both everyday moments and special occasions, her desserts bring the same thoughtful approach to a wedding table as they do to a casual afternoon treat.
99
Mina Park’s Brooklyn-based project 99 draws on the flavors and memories of her Asian-American childhood, then gives them a decidedly contemporary shape. Her cakes often arrive as bold sheet designs or sculptural tiers, with playful proportions and graphic finishes that make them feel as considered as any other part of the tablescape. Inside, things stay light: airy sponge, whipped cream, fruit-forward fillings and seasonal produce keep the sweetness beautifully restrained. Mina also creates custom jellies and desserts for catering, extending that same mix of nostalgia, precision and visual wit beyond the cake itself.
Lilli Maren
There is an art-school energy to Lilli Maren’s cakes. Her portfolio feels like an ongoing series of experiments, where pyramids, painterly finishes, jewel-like desserts and odd little edible objects can all exist side by side. The fun is in never quite knowing where the next idea will land. Lilli seems happiest when she can take something familiar and push it slightly off course. What ties it all together is not a signature look, but a willingness to keep testing the limits of what dessert can be.
Yip Studio
Amy Yip has turned the rough beauty of stone into an unmistakable cake signature. She founded Brooklyn-based Yip Studio in 2019, bringing a background in textile and print design to cakes that look more like surreal objects than traditional confections. Her carved and mossy forms play with craggy surfaces, irregular silhouettes, and carefully placed fruit and flowers, with every composition considered through texture, proportion and structure. Beneath those otherworldly exteriors are Asian-inspired flavors, adding another layer of character to Amy’s work. Each piece is made individually, so even the studio’s now-signature rock cakes never feel like variations on the same idea.
Picnic
Picnic grew from a small idea into something much bigger than self-taught baker Nicola Collie first imagined. Originally from New Zealand’s South Island, she moved to the US nearly a decade ago, first landing in New York before eventually finding her way to California’s high desert. During the pandemic, the early food project slowly turned into a full-time profession, with Nicola building Picnic around the things she cares about most: generous hospitality, beautifully finished desserts and flavors that never get lost beneath the decoration. That sense of warmth, openness to new ideas and curiosity about flavor still sit at the heart of everything she makes.
Dreamy Figs
Brooklyn-based Dreamy Figs sits somewhere between a patisserie and a daydream. Cake artist Bella’s treats are playful, textured, and just a little fantastical, often crowned with ripe fruit, surprising vegetables and flowers in full bloom. Her work draws on traditional cake-making techniques, but the finish feels anything but old-fashioned, thanks to bold color, generous piping and an instinct for the slightly unexpected. Some cakes are lush and abundant, others softer and more delicate, yet all share the same sense of whimsy. They catch the eye first, then make an equally strong case once you actually taste them.
Jordan Rondel
Jordan Rondel has a knack for making cake feel like part of the styling. Working from her small Los Angeles bakery, she enjoys experimenting with offbeat finishes, including non-edible crystal chains and metal studs, giving her cakes a look that would sit perfectly at home in a fashion editorial. Jordan skips fondant and synthetic color in favor of fresh flowers, freeze-dried fruit and natural powders, which keeps the decoration feeling fresh even when the look is bold. The flavor list is no less adventurous, with matcha cherry, lemon raspberry and triple berry among her staples, plus seasonal combinations that change with what is available.
Roxanne Rosensteel
Roxanne Rosensteel’s work stretches well beyond the traditional wedding cake. From her Santa Barbara kitchen come flower-covered sheet cakes, airy pavlovas, meringue croquembouches, and berry tarts—the kind of desserts that invite people to gather around the table and linger a little longer. Fresh fruit, flowers, and soft, sculptural finishes run through much of her work, giving even the more elaborate pieces an easy, generous touch. Everything feels celebratory without losing that relaxed, handmade charm.
Velvet Valley Cakes
Vintage romance is Blair Gutierrez’s playground. Through Velvet Valley Cakes, she brings back old-school celebration cakes with piped borders, buttercream swags, heart shapes, tiered silhouettes and, every so often, a pair of swans. The references may be nostalgic, but Blair gives them enough color, scale and attitude to keep the mood from slipping into pure throwback. Based in New York and serving Long Island and the surrounding areas, she creates cakes that feel nostalgic in all the right ways, with plenty of personality layered in.
Butter
Butter by Kiara Rose has a particular way with texture. Cakes are covered edge to edge in intricate piping that can read like lace, embroidery or something pulled from an old pastry book, then nudged somewhere much less predictable with sculptural greenery, vegetables or oddly placed blooms. The mood can swing from soft and romantic to almost eccentric, but there is always a tension between meticulous handiwork and something looser creeping through it. Matcha cream and other distinctive flavors make sure the inside has just as much character as the exterior.
Cooking Señorita
Working between New York and Puerto Rico, Valeria Gomez, the pastry chef behind Cooking Señorita, folds a sense of nostalgia into cakes that can swing from ruffled and romantic to leopard-print, jewel-studded or almost sculptural. In Valeria's work, old-school piping and classic celebration cakes are reworked through a fashion-minded lens, with plenty of room to play with proportion, color and finish. The references can shift from one commission to the next, but the feeling underneath stays personal: desserts that carry a little of home with them, however dressed up they become.
Doris Bakery
Somewhere between a wedding and a Baroque painting lives Doris Bakery. Swans perch on tiers, ribbons of piping, and flowers seem to spill across the cake rather than simply decorate it. The Nashville studio can go sharp and architectural just as easily as soft and romantic, with geometric towering stacks giving all that ornament a little structure. Then come the flourishes: cupids, bows, ornate borders and other little relics of vintage wedding grandeur. The mood is unapologetically romantic, yet there is always a fresh twist tucked into the details.
Gabby Bakes
If you're dreaming of a vintage-inspired tiered cake, Gabby Bakes is a must. Run by self-taught baker Gabby Duncan out of a Seminole Heights studio, the bakery has become a name to know in Tampa Bay for its instantly recognizable wedding cakes. Known for elaborate strings of buttercream and retro style piping, she traces her inspiration to Victorian architecture and the cake decorating of the 70s and 80s. The bakery only bakes small batch from scratch, using single-origin spices when possible.
Rafy Cakery
Rafy Cakery is a micro home bakery serving New York City and New Jersey, with a focus on vintage-style buttercream cakes. Lattice lines and intricate pipings cover the cakes, which come full size and as micro slices small enough to hold in one hand. Fresh flower cakes, mini two-tiered cakes, and swan cakes also fill out the menu, but their colorful sheetcakes in vibrant color combinations are what really draws us in.
Madison Scott
Brooklyn-based Madison Scott (who also runs Heirloom Supper Club), and has an eye for cakes that read like keepsakes from another era. Her signature style often incorporates a single shade of buttercream with with tone-on-tone piping around the edges. With so few colors competing and often topped with cherries for an extra vintage-inspired touch, every detail gets noticed.
