Bayou Saint Cake
Using seasonal ingredients, Bronwen Wyatt crafts cottage-core cake fantasies
Bronwen Wyatt is hesitant to label her small-batch layer cakes as works of art; simple and striking, topped with thick squiggles or ribbons of buttercream and color-saturated florals, the thirty-six-year-old pastry chef favors the term “craft” instead, a preference that takes her precision into account. Abstract and expressive, surreal and delightedly whimsical, Wyatt’s idiosyncratic cake design has given her New Orleans tiny-bakery brand, Bayou Saint Cake, a signature aesthetic. The chef describes her ideal cake as simple, rustic, warm, and topped with fruit and cream–essentially, it’s a cottage-core cake fantasy, presented with an earnest, imperfect, and indisputable beauty.
While Wyatt has carved out a sweet niche in New Orleans for the past ten years and counting, she is originally from Annapolis, Maryland. She moved to the Deep South to attend Tulane University, where she studied fine arts and English, aspiring to a career as a freelance journalist. Following the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina, Wyatt graduated and moved to Portland, Maine in 2007. While living with her brother, Colin, who worked as a chef, she took a job as a line cook at his restaurant to pay the bills.
“On one hand, I liked it. And I was good at it,” Wyatt said. “But on the other hand, it’s also that a lot of the time, women in kitchens get shuffled to baking no matter what. It’s like the sexist notion that women are more delicate to touch and are better at making things pretty.”
After a two-year stint working in San Francisco, Wyatt returned to New Orleans, stacking her resume with gigs at some of the city’s standout concepts such as Le Petite Grocery, Shaya, Willa Jean, and most recently, the Bywater’s Elysian Bar, the sister restaurant of James-Beard-nominated Bacchanal Wine. When Wyatt joined the ranks of New Orleans’ hospitality and service industry workers who had been furloughed due to the pandemic, she turned to her side hustle as a source of alternate income, and, as she tells it, “the orders just kept coming.” Posting her cakes on Instagram, she amassed over sixteen thousand followers within a period of less than two years. She’s made as few as seven, to as many as thirty-six, cakes in the span of a single week.
From her new commercial kitchen space at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood, Wyatt is slowly scaling her operations from the catering kitchen she occupied before.
Even Wyatt herself was surprised by the speed at which her one-woman operation became a full-time job with an LLC attached to it, a reaction she attributes to imposter syndrome.
“The kinds of cakes that I make, there’s a huge audience for them in places like San Francisco, New York, even Chicago. There’s tons of makers who’ve been doing that, like far before I came on the scene. And looking at those markets, I think that sometimes I wasn’t always sure how to play this market.”
With so many years in her adopted home, Wyatt understands the sentiment behind New Orleanians’ tendencies to cling to their original recipes; searching for the same doberge or classic berry chantilly or Randazzo’s plain cinnamon year after year. And the city has a league of talented local bakers who have perfected the old favorites, she contends.
Wyatt’s level of craft lies in reinterpreting traditional dishes for a fusion of old and new. Flambéed bananas, a classic New Orleans dessert, makes way for roasted plantains and orange blossom ice cream, scattered with a nutty, salty-sweet brittle; bread pudding pares down its bourbon-soaked past to try on tender seasonal fruits and a lighter, buttery custard.
“There’s something really satisfying about having a blank canvas in front of you and being able to burnish it exactly how you want it to look before it’s sent out the door. As a pastry chef, you’re not always actually plating the dish that you put on the menu. And I think as a control freak, I found that really satisfying.”
Wyatt’s baking philosophy places flavor first, focusing on organic sustainability and sourcing from what is available and in season from local growers. The beauty of seasonal eating, she says, lies in the lessons it teaches upon leaving —to savor the foods of the moment intensely, while they are here. The ephemeral cycle of the seasons ensures an ever-changing menu.
Just look at the descriptions of her cakes: layers of olive oil and graham flour chiffon cake with Meyer lemon curd, coconut sugar buttercream, and candied kumquats; corn chiffon with slow-roasted Louisiana strawberries, sour cream custard, and pomegranate molasses buttercream; three layers of rye devil’s food cake, soaked in rose fudge sauce, with sour cream mousse between the layers and cocoa buttercream. Ask and she can tell you the source of each and every ingredient—from florals and citrus fruit to flour and spices. Her lineup of local growers includes Molly Fay Flower Farm, Baby T-Rex Farms, and Nightshade Farm and Flowers, along with Jo LaRocca, the gardener at Bacchanal, and occasionally the Faubourg St. John Community Garden.
For the current Carnival season, Wyatt’s sugar-glazed king cake varieties include: Sweet Potato and Cardamom Meringue; Cinnamon Date with Sour Cream Glaze; Walnut Frangipane with Apple Cider Vinegar Glaze and Cream Cheese Frosting; and Bittersweet Chocolate and Kumquat King Cake. Orders go on sale weekly, and sell out quickly.
[Read this: Going all in on King Cake this year—a journey to try each one.]
She’s held Instagram cake raffles to benefit New Orleans-based mutual aid groups Southern Solidarity and Imagine Water Works, a local queer-led community group, and has directed a portion of profits from sales to a fund for the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe, Red Canary Song, and other hurricane relief groups.
You can order Bayou Saint Cake for weekly Thursday, Friday, and Saturday pickups via the Bayou Saint Cake Minimart website. Email Wyatt directly for custom cake inquiries at bayousaintcake@gmail.com, and follow Bayou Saint Cake on Instagram for cake, pie, and cookie flash sales.