It Took 105 Cakes to Make Sitting in Bars With Cake
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The post It Took 105 Cakes to Make Sitting in Bars With Cake appeared first on Consequence.
In the upcoming Prime Video film Sitting in Bars With Cake, two young women living in Los Angeles come up with a plan to meet guys: Bringing fabulous homemade cakes created by Jane (Yara Shahidi) to local bars as a conversation starter. It’s an idea that spilled over into real life during production, according to director Trish Sie (Pitch Perfect 3) and food stylist Megan Potthoff — in part because Potthoff went all out to create cakes that didn’t just look good on camera, but tasted good as well.
“The cakes just kind of start having a life of their own — you have to take care of them,” says Sie about her experience working with the film’s pastry co-stars. “They have bad moods and they have days when they’re not cooperating. They’re not unlike working with dogs or cats on set, really. They may be a little bit less finicky than dogs or cats, but they can be finicky.”
Fortunately, she had plenty of help with that element of the film’s production. Potthoff became a food stylist after working for 15 years as a pastry chef, eight of those under Wolfgang Puck. “At the end of 2019, I got a little burnt out and wanted to do something different,” she tells Consequence. “So I stepped out of the restaurant world and took some time for myself and I had friends in food styling. Once I started, I fell in love with it, because I love making food look pretty.”
Her background in pastry made her more than well-suited for this particular gig, which did require a lot of cake. One of the tough things about food styling is the need to create multiple versions of anything that appears on screen, since you don’t really get a second take. when you’re slicing into a cake. “And you also can’t be like, ‘Oh, we just used our last cake, can someone fly in another one?'” says Sie. “That doesn’t happen in five or ten minutes. So we erred on the side of having too much cake.”
As a director, Sie thought she was prepared for what the production would require, because “I shot commercials before for food restaurants and for food products, so I had an inkling that we were looking at a lot of cake. But when we started making a timeline of cakes in the office, and realizing how many we were gonna have to design and make, and then realizing how many, like doubles and triples of those we were gonna need, and how many people on the cast like didn’t eat gluten or didn’t eat dairy… It starts to sort of multiply itself out. I was about halfway through the prep process when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna be drowning in cake.”
For Sitting in Bars, the magic number of cakes needed for a scene was usually five, because for Potthoff, “it wasn’t realistic to have 10 to 15 of each cake — five was pretty attainable for me.” By the numbers, Potthoff says she designed close to 30 original cakes for the production, many of which she duplicated as many as five times for their time on camera — including some test cakes in the mix, she estimates having made about 105 cakes in total for the film.
There are food stylist “secrets and tricks,” Potthoff says, that are used when the food on screen is not being eaten. But for this production, she says, the idea was “let’s cater to the actors — like, they’re eating this, there’s multiple takes. We’re making sure that the cake is cold and safe for eating and it’s held properly.”
This meant that according to Potthoff, the cakes were “all edible. We didn’t do any fake food styling tricks besides, like, if there was a cake that wasn’t being eaten and it was just a whole cake, sometimes we would just do a dummy cake, which is a styrofoam round decorated like a cake. That was only a couple of times, though.”
Technically, Potthoff could have gotten away with making cakes that resemble the description without tasting that way — how would the audience know, after all, that a mocha frosting wasn’t really chocolate? “I could have,” she admits with a laugh, “but as a pastry person, I couldn’t help myself. So there’s a pumpkin pie cake and I really put pumpkin and spices in it, and for the pina colada cocktail cake, I really used pineapple passion fruit filling that was tropical. Because I have this pastry background and I wanted it to taste really good and fun for the girls, I couldn’t help myself.”
Accommodating actors who had gluten sensitivity issues did present a bit of a challenge, because “gluten-free cake doesn’t necessarily hold up structurally the same way,” according to Sie. However, by plating similar-looking gluten-free slices for those cast members, they were still able to eat on camera.
In fact, Sie had no pushback from the cast about the amount of cake that would need to be eaten on camera. “People were very adventuresome about eating cake — and about eating everything. Like, there’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant and there were times where I had to be like, ‘Guys, however many sticky rice balls you eat in take one, you’re gonna have to eat in take 15. Are you sure you wanna eat all those sticky rice balls?’ These actors can eat. They were not afraid to eat cake or anything else. I was very pleasantly surprised.”
To create the full line-up of cakes featured in the film, Potthoff was initially given names and ideas from the script, to which she was able to bring her own suggestions. “Really, all I had to work with was names of cake — licorice and leather cake, Chinese prune cake. So it was really just coming up with a design that matched.”
Sitting in Bars With Cake (Prime Video)
In the production office, adds Potthoff, “we had a board that had all the cakes and we started filling it with inspo first. Then, we would replace [inspiration photos] with my cake, once that we had it approved and everyone was happy with it. And by the end we had a whole wall of all the cakes”.
One cake that was a bit of a struggle was the carrot cardamon cake. Says Potthoff, “We started off with something very elegant and simple, and then we went into something a little too wacky and crazy, and then we had to scale it back. It was always a joint effort. The producers, the director, production designer, and me kind of all coming together and chatting it out. And what we ended with, with that carrot cardamom cake, was really cool. It was sort of an orange ombre, and it had little ghost sugar cookies that I had made. I put a lot of love and effort into these cakes, even with the decorations.”
Sitting in Bars With Cake isn’t just sugary fun, as the film takes on a more serious vibe when the adventurous Corinne (Odessa A’zion), Jane’s best friend and partner in cake-barring, is diagnosed with cancer. When it came to introducing that element, Sie says that “I did like the idea that you think it’s one thing, and it’s more than that. But at the same time, I don’t want to leave people un-warned about this — a lot of people are going through this in their life or have been through it, and I don’t want to needlessly trigger or retraumatize anybody. And I don’t want people going in thinking they’re gonna get a light frothy movie when it is heavier than that.”
As she explains, “We’ve played with the balance both in the cut of the movie itself, and also in how we present it to people with the trailer. I want people to know it gets deep and stuff gets real, and the stakes are high. But also, I do think in the end it’s a life-affirming, joyful movie about friendship and resilience and finding your way in the world. And I don’t want people to think it’s just a bummer because that wasn’t our intent.”
One of Sie’s favorite cake moments on set came with the licorice and leather cake. “It had this really beautiful edible lace work on it, and we were in this bar which was really hot and smoky, and it was summertime in Los Angeles and we’re shooting this really sexy scene because the girls are all dressed up for a night out and there’s this preposterous burlesque show going on… and the cake just started sliding off of its foundation, because it was just so hot.”
Continues Sie, “There was something so beautiful about that cake sliding at that point. That was such a real thing, that if you’re in a bar with a cake in summer in Los Angeles, of course the frosting’s gonna get soft and it’s gonna slide and it just seems so real. I remember someone being like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, cut, cut. We gotta get a new cake in here. The cake is sliding off.’ And I was like, you know what? I think maybe we just let it look like that. It is a beautiful cake, and I didn’t want to ruin its beauty, but I loved that it was doing that in that moment.”
As you might expect — yes, once production wrapped for the day on a cake scene, it became a free-for-all for the crew. “Everyone was happy to take cake home,” Potthoff says. “In fact, one of our PAs would always take one of the extra cakes that we had, if we had one. She would take it to bars and do her own cake-barring project.”
According to Sie, the real-life cake-barring worked: “They got a lot of attention.”
Sitting in Bars With Cake premieres Friday, September 8th on Prime Video. Subscribe to Prime Video here.
It Took 105 Cakes to Make Sitting in Bars With Cake
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