35-year-old tech worker turned baking hobby into 'cake picnic' that's attracted thousands

Elisa Sunga picked up baking five years ago; now, she hosts a touring cake festival that’s attracted thousands of bakers from around the world.

By day Elisa Sunga, 35, is a senior UX program manager for Google. Five years ago, like many people, Sunga took up baking during the pandemic “and just fell in love with it,” she tells CNBC Make It.

Then, about a year ago, her sweet tooth got the best of her: “I really wanted to eat a lot of cake, to be honest,” she says. “But at the same time, I didn’t want to bake all of the cake, and so I thought to myself, ‘What if I just created an event, and the requirement was everyone coming needed to bring a whole cake?'”

Thus began her idea of Cake Picnic, where the main rule is “no cake, no entry.”

Sunga initially posted her plans for an informal cake gathering on Instagram thinking 15 people would show up.

As it turns out, a lot more people wanted in on the sweet chaos. “Every time I would refresh the RSVP page,” Sunga says, “it would just be up 50, 100, 150, 200. It capped at 300.”

In April 2024, she hosted her first Cake Picnic event in San Francisco with 183 cakes.

Throughout the year, Sunga took Cake Picnic on tour to Los Angeles and New York before hosting a second San Francisco stop in the fall. Things really took off during a March 2025 event, where people brought and tasted over 1,300 cakes at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor.

Cake Picnic’s Instagram page went from 20,000 followers to over 100,000 within a day, Sunga says.

“It literally changed the Cake Picnic game,” she says.

What motivates hundreds of people at a time to bake an entire cake to share with strangers at a park?

Sunga points to the unique experience, for one. “It’s the opportunity to just see hundreds of cakes at one time, where you have the opportunity to eat a matcha cake, a raspberry cake, an ube cake, a chocolate cake, all in the span of three minutes,” she says. “When do you ever really get a cake buffet experience like that?”

Events also bring together the baking community, Sunga adds, from beginners to pastry chefs. “No matter what skills you have, we are all truly just here because we love cake,” she says.

Gatherings are a source of inspiration where bakers see how other experiment with flavors and designs.

Then, there’s the joy of it all. “You are attending this event because you love cake, you probably bake, you choose happiness and joy and delightful things,” Sunga says. “So the people that come to Cake Picnic are like friends of your heart.”

Sunga works on Cake Picnic a few hours each week on nights and weekends, with hours swelling in the weeks leading up to an event date. The project’s team consists of Sunga’s partner and co-founder, Danny Knight, and a network of friends and collaborators across the U.S.

Cake Picnic also relies on volunteers in each tour city to bring events to life on the day-of.

Sunga says managing a sprawling team has helped her practice communication, leadership and delegation skills. “Ultimately, I think that it’s just so fun that our project is cake” and so “I don’t mind working on it 6 to 9 p.m. every day.”

Sunga aims to standardize event tickets to $30 across all tour stops in order to pay herself and Knight for the time they spend on the project (she declined to share how much she and Knight draw from sales). They’re also getting to the point of bringing in some profit, Sunga says, which she wants to invest back into the cake community like by commissioning artists to create pieces for events.

At this time, Sunga has no plans of making Cake Picnic her full-time job but hopes to grow a team to be able to manage it globally.

Leaning into the project full-time would change her relationship to the joy it brings her, she says.

“Initially, I started Cake Picnic because I wanted to eat cakes, and I wanted to meet baker friends,” Sunga says. “I think that if I did it full time, that would change how I feel about the event. Like, rather than being excited about eating cake and meeting friends, it would be focused on, like, how do I grow this thing?”

Plus, she adds, she likes her job at Google, where she works on community and learning initiatives, which “keeps me happy.”

So far, Cake Picnic has hosted seven events featuring over 3,500 cakes. It held its first international picnic in London in July, where guests brought over 400 cakes.

Tickets for the next event on Saturday in LA sold out in seconds, Sunga says, and resulted in a 11,000-person wait list.

Attendees have come from out-of-state and countries around the world like Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Kuwait, Spain and Ireland, to name a few.

The project will head to Minneapolis, San Francisco and New York later in the fall.

Cake Picnic’s rapid growth continues to be “pretty mind-boggling,” Sunga says. “It’s such an honor for me. We have so many options of what we could be doing with our time. There’s concerts, there’s dinners, there’s brunches, there’s rotting time at home. And it’s such an honor that people are like, ‘I’m gonna come to Cake Picnic.'”

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