NOT JUST A PIECE OF CAKE
At Sweet Retreat you get delicious, custom-made delights — and the knowledge you’re helping a good cause too
Have your cake and get to eat it too with Bangkok’s latest luxury cake bakers, Sweet Retreat. The British cake decorators behind this enterprise have an amazing ability to create edible works of art — where sugar-crafted flowers and hand-sculpted models that look a tad too real actually taste pretty good.
Although their website offers a solid selection of custom-made cakes, cookies and cupcakes for you to choose from, the main kick here is that it’s probably more fun to pull it right out of your own imagination to create a cake like no other. Even if gravity-defying details are your preference, it can be done — as we see from their example of a sugar bird flying in the air, holding a ribbon from the cake in its beak. To achieve this, you won’t be seeing any wires or inedible details, as the bake house places great importance on hygiene standards by working with Food Hygiene Asia.
The sugar toppings are made with citrusy-tasting fondants of varying hardness, where soft ones will melt under the heat. The size 4 sugar shoe, however, is rock solid and will last as long as you want it to, as sugars are preservatives that can be kept for your viewing pleasure. Get your orders in early though if you want to make a super complicated cake — something like the shoebox cake with the high-heel sugar shoe (8,000 baht) on top could take up to a week and half to make, as the time for pieces to set and cool down are an unavoidable process.
You can come up with flavours of your own too, although their extensive list of flavours already sound irresistibly mouth-watering enough. An endless and specific array of cakes and buttercream combos pack their website, but you can switch around the combinations too if you prefer something off the menu. There are British delights like the Victoria Sponge, made with strawberry liquor/jam and paired with vanilla buttercream, to less common choices like chocolate cake and mint buttercream. We like the sound of vanilla sponge with Bailey’s buttercream, while an apple cake with cinnamon buttercream are a nod to the Western palate. You can go for safe-sounding picks too, like green tea topped with green tea cream, out of the 35 flavours listed.
Most importantly, however, is the fact that Sweet Retreat also runs The Baking Project, an initiative to help underprivileged Thai women and women at risk by equipping them with baking and sugar-crafting skills. This 12-week vocational training is free of charge and creates opportunities for these women to become skilled in the artistry of cake-making. There’s even a graduation ceremony, which project coordinator Sarah Brown says not only affirms the skills they have learned, but also helps them move beyond their past and old stigmas.
The women may choose to work for Sweet Retreat after they have graduated from the training course, but are also welcome to take what they have learned to build a future of their own. There are only four women training right now, but during this festive month of giving, knowing that the cake you’d be ordering helps support the less fortunate is definitely the best kind of topping on the cake.