Thousands on waitlist for cake picnics put on by local culinary school in Toronto

Cake picnics are a hot new trend right now, and thankfully if you want to experience them in Toronto, a local culinary school is putting together these kinds of events.

However, you’ll either have to be very lucky or have a lot of patience to attend.

Cake picnics are community events where every guest has to bring a cake and give it a name tag, and participants swap slices of cake. Viral cake picnics have been held in places like New York and San Francisco.

Local Toronto culinary school Le Dolci has taken the reins on organizing cake picnics where people in Ontario can enjoy this trendy event, and the idea has taken off like wildfire. Owner Lisa Sanguedolce says she’s been fielding many requests every hour to get a ticket or get on the waitlist.

While the idea was inspired by cake picnics in the United States, it actually originally started out much smaller with a simple get-together for virtual students.

“I was hosting a Zoom check-in mid-March with our six-week online course students, and one of them mentioned it would be fun to meet after the course ends and do something like they did in the U.S. where everyone brings cake and meets and greets. I said I loved the idea and we should definitely do this,” Sanguedolce tells YourCityWithIN.com.

“Our students who study online don’t get to ever meet and the teachers never get to meet them in real life too, so I thought this was perfect and was trying to organize a cookie meetup, but this seemed perfect for our cake students. I said I would pick a time and date and let everyone know, and voila, our little cake picnic was born.”

She loved the colourful photos of cakes she was shown of American cake picnics, and was tickled to start her own. An unexpected number of others also felt the excitement, as within one hour of announcing the event, the waitlist had already soared into the thousands.

“Someone on TikTok found out after I sent it to only our online course students and it went viral,” says Sanguedolce. “We’re not on TikTok, I am old, so I wasn’t sure what was happening, and who all these people were who were booking.”

Right now the first Toronto cake picnic is planned for May 24 with a capacity of just 150, so unfortunately many cake lovers will be going hungry. Still, it’s only inspiration to continue putting on bigger and better cake picnics, with a larger event with the city planned for as early as June.

“They are excited to dress up, eat cake and meet other cake lovers and I think experience the magic of so many cakes in one place. Also, I think they fell in love with the viral videos from the USA which showed it as such a fun community event and everyone right now, post pandemic is looking for community,” says Sanguedolce.

“Gathering is so important and we see this every night in our classes, people want to get out, meet new people, socialize, talk about a passion – making cake – and be part of something other than their daily routine.”

If you’re concerned about the food safety aspect of eating cakes made by strangers, take note that there should be a waiver signed by all participants stating that all ingredients must be listed, cakes are baked in good faith and that guests attend of their own accord.

At this early stage, Sanguedolce wants to learn what she can from this first cake picnic in order to put on even bigger and better cake picnics in the future, but of course, that’s far from the only thing this creative bakery owner has in the oven.

“We still want to replicate our friend Sol Orwell’s Cookie Off where he raised over 200K for charity in his cookie event. I’ve been mentioning this in team meetings for months and think this is a great impetus to get a date for it on the books too,” says Sanguedolce.