Grab a 'cake pint' at this new downtown Bangor specialty bakery

Emily Burnham, Bangor Daily News, Maine
·2 min read

Apr. 12—Though beautifully decorated cakes for special occasions are her main focus at her bakery, Wildflour Cake Design baker Asa Harned also has a grab and go product that's her totally unique idea — cake pints.

Pint containers you'd normally see holding ice cream are filled with various flavors of her cake and an array of fillings, like buttercream, jam, chocolate sauce and other sweet stuff. Wildflour Cake Design, located at 20 State St., the former location of Tea & Tarts, opened on April 1, and Harned said she's sold out of cake pints nearly every day she's been open.

Harned, 34, who grew up in Ellsworth, said she got the idea for cake pints from her time living in San Diego, where she originally started Wildflour Cake Design. Some of her most popular flavor varieties are Earl Grey cake with lavender buttercream, cookies and cream cake, and a decadent chocolate on chocolate.

"I did these farmers markets, and there were other bakeries that made cakes in a jar that were really popular," Harned said. "I thought cake pints were a really fun idea, because you can share them, you can pop them in the fridge and eat them over a couple of days, and since they don't need to be structurally sound, you can really experiment with fillings."

Though Harned attended Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, graduating in 2009 with a degree in marine biology, baking became her passion when she moved to California. When she moved back to Maine in 2016, she began baking wedding and other special cakes out of her newly established certified home kitchen. Eventually, she found she was running out of room.

"I knew I was ready to take the next step and open a standalone bakery. Then the pandemic happened, so that kind of slowed that down," Harned said. "But then this space in downtown became available, so we jumped at it."

In addition to her specialty cakes and the cake pints, Harned makes traditional French macarons, as well as cupcakes, cookies and the occasional one-off, like gourmet crisped rice treats and hot cocoa bombs.

Wildflour Cake Design will have limited hours to start, open to the public from 3 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays. Most of Harned's creations can be special ordered, however, by emailing wildflourmaine@gmail.com or calling 207-745-8319.