Baker Alice Bennett, also known as Miss Trixie Drinks Tea, is the self-proclaimed queen of cakes in Melbourne. She assumes her cheeky email signature is why she was tapped as an assistant judge at Australia’s inaugural Cake Picnic. When the global phenomenon descended on Kings Domain in Melbourne last Saturday, 1,600 cakes were artfully presented and then summarily devoured as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival (MFWF).
Created in San Francisco in 2024 by amateur baking enthusiast Elisa Sunga, the first Cake Picnic was conceived as a way for the Californian to eat more cake than she could be bothered to bake. Her event has now toured nine cities, and will be visiting Sydney on Saturday 28 March. In the years since Cake Picnic began, unrelated mass cake swapping events have also been held in Australia.
In the spirit of a pot luck, the idea is simple: bring an offering and share the spoils. There’s a winner – technically, but Cake Picnic is not a competition, or even a showcase, it’s cakenomic redistribution on a grand scale. Bake one, then sample until your sugary little heart is content. Unpretentious and egalitarian, it is governed by one rule above all – no cake, no entry.
Bennett had her game face and party dress on for the occasion. As the sublime autumn sun shone down, she had high hopes. “I’m aiming for 1,000, but I’ll be sad if I don’t get to taste at least 50.”
As the proceedings commenced at 11am, a sea of gingham skirts and boldly patterned frocks billowed across the grass towards a marquee, shepherded by an army of pink-shirted MFWF staff, doing their best to maintain order. The giddy crowds were marshalled through to their designated drop-off zones, where they abandoned their creations along hundreds of metres of trestle tables, draped in starched white cloth.
Once the tables were set the masses, including the two judges, had their chance to peruse the offerings and formulate their attack.
“Longtime baker and longtime cake eater” Polly Stokes travelled more than 600km, from Canberra, with her 10-year-old daughter, Milly, for the event. She’d whipped up a tried and true chocolate raspberry number, while Milly embarked on an ambitious chocolate rainbow marshmallow creation. But showcasing their efforts wasn’t a priority: “We’re here for the fun of it, this is such a beautiful, relaxed environment and everyone has put in such effort!”
From towering tiers to intricately decorated masterpieces, she wasn’t wrong. A literal tonne of cake (at least) was served at the event.
“Just think of how many ovens in Melbourne were being used. Of how much sugar, butter, flour was being used up in all these kitchens all around the city,” Sunga said. “Imagine all of the love and energy that’s been poured into the cakes that we are sharing here together today!”
A staunch advocate for cake for cake’s sake, she laments our tendency to reserve it for special occasions. Birthday cakes and wedding cakes are great, she says, but “why not cake on a random Saturday in March too?”
Friends of three decades Sarah Grinzi and Hannah Millicer know what she means. Baking cakes, Millicer says, is always a labour of love. But when you’re putting them together for birthdays or other celebrations, they’re still a form of labour. Baking for the Cake Picnic felt less like obligation and more like a radical act of self-care. “We could do whatever we wanted!”
What she wanted, as it turns out, was to splurge. Millicer’s chocolate fudge cake with blueberry jam and swiss meringue buttercream, infused with freeze dried blueberries, cost her nearly $150 to make – “$28 on butter alone!”
With refreshingly little fanfare, a best in show, decorated like a tin of anchovies, and two runners-up were announced, then the crowds, armed with family-sized pizza boxes were unleashed and the bacchanalia of buttercream began in earnest. No slice limits were enforced and the novel concept of queuing was dispensed with. But cake, it seems, brings out the best in people. No chantilly skirmishes in sight.
By the end of the day Sunga was on “a sugar dream cake high”, declaring the event “absolutely spectacular on all levels and degrees”.
With the Melbourne event tipping the all-time number of Cake Picnic cakes over 10,000, Sunga has long since given up counting those she samples. Chocolate cakes, she says, are usually her favourite, but in an effort to embrace the local customs she couldn’t go past the potato chip bill of the Australian Women’s Weekly’s notorious duck cake. The unsettling creation took her aback at first, “but then I heard the story and I was like, ‘awww, that is so precious’.”
