No cake? No entry to this West Philly picnic that brought close to 100 confections to Clark Park.

From a distance, it looked like several dozen small birthday parties. Up close, it was a smorgasbord of ornately decorated yet haphazardly cut homemade cakes.

Close to 100 cakes lined folding tables in the southwest corner of Clark Park on Sunday for the second annual West Philadelphia cake picnic organized by Florian Francis, a tufting artist who dabbles in cake decorating.

The free event’s rules were simple, said Francis: No cake, no entry. As for bringing something store-bought? Just plain cheating.

“There are so many barriers to experiencing joy nowadays when it feels like it costs a minimum of $50 just to go out,” said Francis, 29. “This is a way for people to make friends without spending a ton of money. [Admission] is just the cost of a cake.”

Francis said their events were inspired by Elisa Sunga, a user experience designer at Google who has built a side hustle out of hosting a touring and ticketed cake picnic. Her first was in San Francisco in April 2024, when strangers devoured 183 cakes in a public park. Since then, Sunga’s events have sold out in seconds, bringing 162 cakes to a field of flowers in San Diego, 180 cakes to a loft in New York City, and a record-setting 1,387 cakes back to the lawn of an art museum in San Francisco.

Francis’ events are craftier and quainter. Their first cake picnic drew about 30 people to Clark Park last November, while Sunday’s event was large enough to have designated sections for gluten-free and vegan confections.

Lines zigzagged around the folding tables as attendees clamored for slices of cakes with bespoke flavors, like matcha funfetti, Earl Grey, and cookies and cream tres leche, to name a few. Fresh flowers and frilly ruffles of Lambeth-inspired buttercream coated the most elaborate offerings.

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For their part, Francis brought a strawberry-and-cheese poke cake decorated to look like a takeout container of spaghetti and meatballs. Strands of yellow buttercream were piped “like Play-Doh” to create the noodles. Four chocolate cake pops stood in as meatballs.

Cake envy, said Francis, is also not allowed.

“So many people expressed worry that their cakes wouldn’t be able to stand up to the rest, but it’s not about bringing the best cake,” Francis said. “It’s a potluck. Everyone is going to be happy.”

Sunday’s picnic drew teen bakers, teams of bakers, and, shockingly, bakers who don’t care much for cake.

Mac Nadeau self-identifies as an “ice cream person” but said she felt the “good kind” of peer pressure to show up and show out after her friends told her about the cake picnic. Her contribution: a two-layer blueberry muffin-inspired cake coated in a lavender colored-frosting and a light drizzle of Nutella.

“I don’t like cake,” said Nadeau, 27. “I just looked up a recipe and added a bunch of random stuff to it.”

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One cake over from Nadeau was Akira Massey, who beamed while sectioning a blood orange tiramisu and a Great British Bake Off-inspired chocolate fudge cake that she covered in thick chocolate ganache. The West Philly eighth grader said this was her first solo baking project, though she did phone a friend (her mom) to talk through the ratio of wet-to-dry ingredients.

“I viewed myself as a bad baker,” said Massey. “You have to be meticulous about what you’re doing.”

You also have to have a touch of whimsy. Sunday’s pièce (of cake) de résistance was a cow. Yes, really.

Sally Pennacchi and her roommate used a lamb-shaped cake mold left over from Easter to bake Franklin, a chocolate cow that grazed on a field of marbled strawberry, cherry, and red currant cakes. The duo piped wisps of thick espresso buttercream to create Franklin’s hair, and plucked flowers from their garden to add a realistic touch to the cake meadow.

By the end of the picnic, only Franklin’s head was left.

“I strive for a silly cake,” said Pennacchi, 28, an engineer who contends that constructing a freestanding calf from box cake mix is “technically not too impressive.” To her, the joy of baking is in creating a wow factor, something that is as much a dessert as it is an experience.

For Alissa Harris, the experience of choosing from nearly 100 cakes to create a sampler felt like a sugar rush straight to the heart. She split her slices with two friends, cheers-ing forks before digging into an array of sponge cakes, Bundt cakes, and chocolate cakes.

“I don’t remember what I grabbed,” said Harris, 38, who drove from Media after hearing about the cake picnic on social media. “Chaos guided me.”