17-07-2025
London's first ‘cake picnic' welcomes hundreds of bakers — and a happy dog
A mong the usual runners, yoga posers and bleary-eyed post-clubbers, another group descended on Greenwich Park on Saturday morning. Rarely do they come together as one. Usually they are found squirrelled away in their kitchens, behind counters, watching from the sidelines as people enjoy the fruits of their labour.
At 8.50am they began trickling in, bearing pristine white cake boxes. At 9am hordes of bakers were making their way to the gleaming long tables set out on the parched lawns near Blackheath Gate, undeterred by the uncharacteristically chilly July morning. Tiered cakes, sandwich cakes, bundt cakes, traybakes, loaf cakes, dessert cakes; a steady parade of carbs was on the move, heading towards London's inaugural Cake Picnic.
Watching from a distance, megaphone in hand, was Elisa Sunga, 35, from San Francisco, a self-professed cake obsessive who dreamt up the idea of a mass cake gathering last year. 'I wanted to eat a lot of cake but I also didn't want to bake all those cakes by myself,' she explained. 'So I thought, if I create an event and make it a requirement that every attendee has to bring a whole cake, then I could eat cake in the park with my friends.'
