On a Wednesday evening in August, Celeste Perkins walked into El Atacor #1 in Cypress Park holding a towering three-tiered cake, frosted in American buttercream and airbrushed in oversaturated hues of red, green and blue. Thick, excessive piping created an otherworldly texture on the cake’s surfaces. Metallic candy pearls gleamed under the fluorescent lights. The dessert’s colors and exuberance took inspiration from the playful, acid-dream paintings of Angeleno artist Isaac Psalm Escoto, also known as Sickid, for whom the cake was made.
Escoto, Perkins’ best friend, was turning 27 and having his birthday party at the legendary fried potato taco joint. El Atacor #1 is frequented by kids from the neighborhood, who play with the vintage pinball machines, and drunken overflow from one of the bars down the street. That evening, a member of the latter group caught his eye on Perkins’ cake and started to get excited.
“Cut the cake!” the stranger called across the room to Escoto, who smiled back nervously. He approached the birthday boy, swaying. “YO! When are you going to cut the cake?”
The cake, it seemed, was upstaging the guest of honor. But that’s what you sign up for when you order a Celeste Perkins cake. “You look at her cakes and you’re just like — holy s—,” says Escoto, who has been friends with Perkins since high school. “They’re like straight out of a cartoon.”
Without question, Perkins — who is a corporate talent acquisition manager by day — makes cakes with big personalities, for big personalities. Last year, she made a cake for Mitski when the singer performed at the Hollywood Bowl: a frosted diorama of the venue with bright orange florals exploding like fireworks from the buttercream edifice and Mitski’s audience depicted as cats and dogs. (That was a request from the artist.) Perkins also made a cake for Suki Waterhouse at the Greek Theatre, which reimagined the venue as a verdant, fairy-tale oasis, overflowing with glittering greenery and florals, with an edible image of Suki overlooking the tableau like a beached mermaid. It mimicked the cover art for Waterhouse’s album, “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin.”
Perkins’ eye-catching cakes are often wacky and absurd. And with such precise creative vision, you’d think she’d been doing it for a while. But the baker born and raised in L.A. first started making cakes seriously in 2022, when she was gifted a set of cake pans by a friend. As a thank you, Perkins made her first cake with those pans for that friend — two tiers blanketed in swirling pastel frosting and studded with real flowers and fresh raspberries. “I brought the cake out at the party and so many people at the party were like, ‘Who made that? Where did you get a cake like that?’” she remembers. The effusive response stunned her, especially in L.A., where, Perkins says, “People are so quick to withhold a compliment.”
So she kept making them, encouraged by the rave reviews: A chocolate cake for Escoto’s 24th birthday, airbrushed in psychedelic blue and green and embellished with gummy bears. A shimmering Christmas cake for a holiday party. A Lana Del Rey-themed cake with a single candle, decorated to look like a cigarette, sticking out of the singer’s mouth. “I was really enjoying the vibe of ‘no rules,’” Perkins says. Although she worked very briefly for a personal chef, she didn’t get any formal training. “If you ask me the number of a single piping tip, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
Indeed, it would be difficult to find the kinds of avant-garde cakes Perkins makes in a grocery store or even in the fridge of a local bakery. They’re not necessarily commercial. In fact, they embody a maximalist trend in cake decoration that inspired one writer at the Cut to write a cranky takedown last July titled “Enough With the Ugly Cakes.”
“These shapeless mounds are slathered with icing and rammed with bits of inedible flora, as if excavated off the forest floor and into a niche online bakery,” opines Bindu Bansinath in her piece, which predictably upset many of the bakers it addresses. “The future isn’t always progress.”
Perkins, of course, begs to differ. “Maximalism is fun. I don’t want to live in a beige house. I like things that are over the top. You can call it camp. You can call it tacky. I just think it’s fun,” she says. She references the oft-quoted advice of Coco Chanel: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” When it comes to cakes, Perkins rejects the rule. “What if I put five more things on? What if I did 10 more things than they asked for?”
It helps that the cakes make for great photographs — and surprising status symbols, ephemeral as they are. The year she started making her “ugly” cakes, Perkins also started to post them to Instagram. Growing up in Los Angeles, and going to a creative arts high school in downtown, she had inadvertently amassed a small audience of well-connected “it” girls, party friends and up-and-comers in creative industries. They hearted her photos and gushed in the comments, prompting the algorithm to push her cakes out to the discover pages of more influential people.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that I have a day job. Even people that I’ve grown up with, they just assume I’m doing cakes full time,” she says. “People close to me know the crazy hustle I rock because I work in West L.A. So I leave my house at 7:50 a.m. and I don’t get [back] home till 7 p.m. And then when I get home I, you know, clock in for my cake shift.”
Perkins’ first big commission was for the cover of Paper Magazine’s 40th anniversary issue, which featured a naked NLE Choppa who used the cake to cover his NSFW body parts. Silhouettes of busty models adorned the sides of the cake, and the words “Happy Birthday Paper” emblazoned on top of it in colorful chocolate letters.
“I found out on a Monday morning that I needed to have it done Wednesday morning,” Perkins says. “I went to bed at like maybe 5 a.m. and I had to be up at 7:30. Oh my God. I literally asked my mom to drive me to work that day.”
And then there was a DM from someone at Sub Pop, wanting a cake for the album release party of Tunde Adebimpe, also frontman for the band TV on the Radio. Perkins made a sparkling black cake and created a crater that was studded with pop rocks. The next week, she ran into Adebimpe at Vidiots and introduced herself as the cake baker.
“I grew up with my brother listening to TV on the Radio on the way to school,” Perkins says. “Obviously, I’m not, like, friends with any of these people, and who knows if they’ll remember me after they eat the cake. But to have this little moment of humanization for both me and for them — to put a face to the cake — is so cool.”
Escoto’s birthday party at El Atacor #1 — so close to the house where Perkins grew up — was, in many ways, a full circle moment. The best friends met at the creative arts high school where Escoto studied visual arts and Perkins learned dance. But, even though so many people around her had creative professional ambitions — her mother was a fashion designer and her brother is a musician — she never found her own “thing,” and ended up in corporate recruiting by accident. Her journey to cake making wasn’t just nontraditional. It was unexpected.
At El Atacor #1, Perkins carefully placed the extra-long candles along each tier of the cake and lit them up for Escoto to blow out. Inside, it was all Oreo, layered with Oreo American buttercream frosting — a reflection of Escoto’s preference for nostalgic flavors.
“It feels like such an act of love,” said Escoto of his birthday cakes over the years. “It’s extremely gratifying to watch her finding the thing that she loves and taking it extremely seriously … to see this person transform into a serious person who does their craft out of nothing but pure excitement and ambition and seriousness for aesthetics. For her to do that for me is really f—ing special.”
Encouraged either by Escoto’s impish grin or the cake’s playful spirit, someone pushed his face into the cake — with just enough force to cover his face in frosting but not enough to topple it over. He took a selfie with the cake, flashing bright blue teeth, right before Perkins cut into her intergalactic confection, the center dense with cookies and cream.
Guests lit up with childish excitement and impatience. Where is it from? Which bakery? They asked Escoto. They were astounded when they realized the cake artist was among us. Someone asked Perkins about the colors, how she got the frosting to look the way it did. It’s all airbrushed. When they ran out of plates, she started shoving slices into plastic cups. Perkins didn’t even really get to watch anyone eat the cake; by the time she was done slicing, it was gone.
Tasbeeh Herwees is a writer born and raised in Los Angeles.
The post The L.A. baker making cakes with big personalities for big personalities appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
