Cake it to the limit
May 26, 2025
Cookbook author and musician Lyndsay Sung, BA ’00, rocks the cake world with her colourful, creative takes on classic bakes. Here, she dishes on top decorating tips, tools, cookbooks and the joys of plant-based baking.
Name: Lyndsay Sung
Expert in: Cake baking and decorating. Sung is the baker behind Coco Cake Land, a cake and dessert blog that conjures a colourful world of luscious, fanciful cakes, or what she describes as a “one-woman cakesplosion.”
Current job: Sung is the author of the cookbooks: Plantcakes: Fancy + Everyday Vegan Cakes for Everyone and Coco Cake Land: Cute and Pretty Party Cakes to Bake and Decorate. Sung also wrote a third cookbook, The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Baking Cookbook, under a pseudonym, Sandy K Snugly (an anagram of her name).
Sung’s signature cakes are bright, fun and whimsical, including one featuring Jabba the Hutt lounging next to a frog friend (why not?), a burger cake and a version of the white confection featured in Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” video (in which the singer famously stabs a cake).
UVic degree: BA in Women’s Studies and Film Studies, 2000.
What is a misconception about plant-based baking?
A common misconception is that it’s not going to taste good. Dry and tasteless, and made using hippie ingredients. The whole concept behind my book Plantcakes was to show folks how to make cakes that are delicious and nice to look at—and no one will ever know they’re dairy-free, or vegan! I love inclusion when it comes to desserts. It’s particularly sad to me when a kid can’t eat cake due to an egg or dairy allergy. Or when a vegan guest has to just eat a piece of fruit instead of a slice of delicious cake.
What is a common mistake people make in the baking and construction stage of cake making?
Probably not reading the recipe thoroughly. Read through a recipe and gather all of your ingredients first so you’re not suddenly scrambling for a half teaspoon of baking soda.
What do you recommend for people who are new to decorating?
I love using fresh berries to immediately style up a cake. Edible flowers are amazing too. Also, buttercream piping can be very simple and piping borders around your cakes, or piping little drop stars can also make your cakes look fancier. (I have tutorials for all this stuff in my books and online @cococakeland!)
You’re a self-taught baker. Where do you turn for advice or inspiration in your bakes?
In the olden days, Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook was my go-to. I still love cookbooks—there’s an excellent one called Sift that I recommend. Of course, nowadays, anything you want to learn about any topic can be found on YouTube. I have a fledgling channel on there, too.
What’s one cake lesson you learned the hard way?
Do not frost your cake before it’s completely cooled.
What is one cake creation that made you particularly proud?
I’ve had a few cake designs go viral, and the one I often cite is the Very Hungry Caterpillar Cupcakes Cake I designed back in 2008. It’s omnipresent now in the cake deco world. Too bad I don’t get paid every time someone makes it, ha ha.
A baking or decorating tool you can’t do without?
My offset spatula. What a great little tool. Smoothing cake batters, frosting cakes, gently patting cookies back into circular shapes fresh out of the oven—I love it.
A (now-not-so) secret ingredient in your flavour profiles?
Folks still lose their minds over the fact that the liquid leftover from a can of chickpeas (that thick and viscous “bean water” that is called aquafaba) can whip up into a meringue, which is then used as a base for a vegan Swiss meringue buttercream, and you can’t taste a lick of beaniness. Pretty, pretty cool.
What is the key to those vibrant, yet appealing colours you create with your cakes?
Ouch, unfortunately probably gel food colouring—a little dab will go a long way. However, you can also achieve bright and beautiful bakes using natural powders (freeze-dried raspberry or dragon fruit powders, etc.) or by covering your cakes with nature’s bounty of berries, candied fruit and edible flowers.
How did what you learned at UVic contribute to your current work?
I always make fun of my degrees a little bit (I have the Women’s Studies/Film Studies one, and also a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr University) because I didn’t study anything practical that would funnel me directly into one particular job.
However, I loved my time so much at UVic. I had so much fun doing extracurricular stuff, such as CFUV radio, and seeing tons of movies at Cinecenta, or playing in our punk band for the Women’s Studies Department 20th anniversary and making lifelong friends. Everything I do now has been shaped by my life experiences, so there’s a little bit of UVic in every cake, I suppose!
What are you working on next?
I’m actually writing a romantic comedy novel.
