When Cake Picnic, created by Elisa Sunga, the baker behind @saltedrye, finally made its way to New York, I had to attend. 180 cakes and 180 people converged in a single space, bonded by a simple love of cake.

The viral event, which made stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles earlier this year, has one simple rule: no cake, no entry. Each attendee must bring a whole cake, homemade or purchased from a local bakery. It’s the spark for a spectacle that is genuinely rare: When have you ever been in a place with as many cakes as there are people?

“You will see cakes that you’ve never even heard about. It’s an opportunity to showcase just the breadth of cake,” says Sunga. “It’s not just yellow cake. I remember walking around the L.A. Cake Picnic, and people were like what is Midori Sour? What is passionfruit? At what party in your life will you ever have a mochi cake next to a princess torta next to a Milk Bar cake?”

Cake Picnic began as a small gathering of about 15 friends in Golden Gate Park. “Once we formed our circle, we would take turns introducing ourselves and what cake we brought to the picnic,” says Sunga on her website.

While the New York edition of Cake Picnic was not so intimate, it leaned into its sweet chaos inside a loft-like space in SoHo. Cakes of all shapes, sizes and flavors – each a centerpiece in itself – lined several long tables, and survived various modes of transportation. Steph Lau of Cookbook Club fame said her black sesame chiffon cake made it through “two subway transfers and several sets of stairs in a cardboard box!!”

Jennifer Hernandez, a professional pastry chef, drove three hours from Saratoga Springs and brought not one, but two cakes. One she dubbed the sort of cake she makes for clients (a stunning sweet potato cake with cardamom roasted New York apples), and another that she says is the only cake she ever wants to eat – the birthday cake she has every year, a yellow cake with Valrhona chocolate cocoa buttercream.

The full range of bakers were in attendance – from professionals like Brooklyn darling Radio Bakery, to influencers like @al.chenny and @thepancakeprincess, to people who figured out how to bake a cake two days ago.

Sunga mentions that the event, despite its one hard rule, maintains an openness. It’s flexible in that it meets people “where they’re at in their cake journey.”

I brought a humble Honey Cake, which I first tasted in the Food Network test kitchen a few months ago, and instantly fell in love with. It’s a simple cake I’ve made on repeat for gatherings ever since, and while it doesn’t look like much, I’m amazed time and time again, by how beautifully bright it tastes (all thanks to orange blossom honey and a generous helping of orange zest). I love sharing it and watching faces light up.

I staked out a spot for my cake on one of the many already-filled tables and unboxed it. Setting your cake out to see and be seen, then tasted, by a room full of strangers is not unlike seeing your baby get on stage.

Attendees were divided into groups and had four minutes to juggle their own pizza box (a nod to New York), filling it with as many different slices of cake as they could. It was impossible to peruse all the cakes (a good problem to have) and choose my picks from there; I just grabbed whatever looked delicious and was within arms’ reach. One TikToker Ryan Nordheimer likened it to “the cake Hunger Games.”

After each of the groups were allowed their four minutes, the cake buffet was open to everyone – and yes, there was still plenty of cake.

One cake is certainly enough for a crowd. And while there is something so intentionally and whimsically irrational about a one-to-one cake-to-human ratio, Sunga relayed one way to have your cake and eat it, too. “You can freeze it and keep it. You can refrigerate it so you don’t need to eat all your cake that day.”

­Cake Picnic seems to be part of a growing interest (especially among Gen Z) in potlucks with strangers, as a form of finding community offline. In February of this year, Steph Lau started a Cookbook Club, in which attendees each make and bring a dish from a single cookbook, and turned a gathering in her one-bedroom apartment into a community of over 2,000 enthusiastic cooks. There are slews of supper clubs operating out of apartments, from Little Poutine to Bazaar to The Baodega – and dinner parties that bring together eight complete strangers.

While many of these potlucks and meals reach their diners through social platforms, they’re satisfying a yearning for in-person connection, and, I hope, promoting a greater embrace for the awkwardness, messiness and serendipity, that comes with meeting strangers and talking to them – with food functioning as both the hook and the excuse.

With an event like Cake Picnic, Sunga says, “It’s like a self-selecting form of community building. You’re intentionally signing up for a picnic that you know is devoted to cake. And so everyone who signs up for this event must love or like cake at some level.”

Cake, or any other food or theme, makes striking conversation with a stranger, well, a little less awkward. In a way, it’s the weather. But it’s a lot more fun to talk about.

“A lot of the attendees, they follow each other on Instagram and so these events are the first time that these people are meeting. So, it’s like a great opportunity to turn Internet friendships into real, in-person friendships,” explains Sunga.

So what’s next for Cake Picnic? “It’s going international next year,” reveals Sunga. The tour will again make its way to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, but also London. RSVPs for 2025 are already open.

But for those who can’t make it, Sunga encourages people to host their own. In fact, a Cake Picnic cookbook with Chronicle Books is in the works, and will offer a guide on how to plan, organize and host picnics, along with recipes and suggested themes.

Until then, I’ll be working through the trove of cake sitting in my freezer.

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