Where to get your next birthday cake

Paulette Goto's creations are *almost* too pretty to eat.

For the past five years, the Brooklyn-based pastry chef Paulette Goto has been making my birthday cake dreams cum true. See here: the cake she made for my 30th birthday last week.

Paulette’s signature style juxtaposes over-the-top frosting florals with provocative phrases that are, in many cases, dirty enough to get her in trouble with Instagram. For example, the cake Paulette made for my mom’s 59th birthday that said, “Happy Birthday you fucking cunt.” We loved it. Zuck apparently did not.

Paulette will be clean if you want her to be—she’s not going to turn you away for asking for a cake that says “Happy Birthday” (as mine did for my 25th). But the fun of ordering from Paulette is just that: the fun of it. She gives you permission to be crazy. There’s nothing she can’t do, nothing she won’t do, and she never says no.

This queen of cakes has brought so much joy to so many people, but she didn’t have a birthday cake of her own until she turned 17. In fact, she didn’t celebrate her birthday at all.

“I grew up in Utah. My mom raised us Jehovah’s Witness, so no birthdays, no Christmas, no holidays, no nothing.” Paulette told me. “I didn’t like it from the very beginning.”

Paulette’s mother threw her out of the house when she was 16. She had to drop out of high school to work two full-time jobs and ended up moving in with her best friend, Ben, whose family became her own.

“Linda, my pseudo mom, made cakes from scratch and decorated them. She taught me how to do it, and that was it.” The first cake Paulette ever made? A model of a plant cell for biology class, once she got back into high school. Then she started making cakes for everything. “I was like, I want to do this forever.”

A few years later, Paulette made her way to the French Culinary Institute, now known as the International Culinary Center, in New York City. After graduation, in 1998, she went on to work at the iconic Manhattan restaurant Le Cirque, under the iconic Manhattan pastry chef Jacques Torres.

That’s where Paulette met her now ex-husband, pastry chef Ken Goto, who helped build Jacques Torres Chocolate. But Paulette knew she wanted to focus on cakes, so after two years at Le Cirque, she landed an internship with Colette Peters, then one of the country’s most respected cake artists.

For a while, as Paulette was raising her daughter, Michiko, she made cakes just for fun. “It's my love language,” she said. “When I meet someone and I love them, I'm like, I want to make you a cake.”

But in 2016, she started turning her talent into a business, selling everything from shag cakes inscribed with “SLUT” to bespoke floral cakes with phrases like, “You’re fucking 40 deal with it.”

“This one cake I did says, ‘I'll cut back on caffeine but not cocaine,’” Paulette said. “I actually overheard that at a party. If I hear something that makes me laugh, as long as it's not mean or insulting anybody, it's going on a fucking cake.”

Paulette’s frosting florals were initially inspired by a bakery in Salt Lake City that she obsessed over as a kid, Mrs. Backer’s Pastry Shop. “They were doing buttercream flowers before it was a thing. Even just going there to get a cupcake was a big deal because it was so expensive for me.”

Throughout the years, Paulette has honed her own version of buttercream flowers, calling them “fantasy florals.” “I've learned that it doesn't need to be exact. I’ll shoot for a type of flower, but this is my interpretation of it.”

As for flavors, yet again, Paulette can do anything. Her chocolate cake is moist and dense, and her frosting is the best I’ve ever had. It tastes like a better, homemade version of Pillsbury canned frosting: thick and creamy, the stuff of a good old-fashioned sugar high.

Paulette’s cakes start at $300 with final pricing determined by size, flavor, and decoration. “Nothing is made in mass, everything is made singularly for each customer, and I don’t ship,” she said. They’re priced at that level because these really aren’t just cakes—they’re edible works of art. And I can’t imagine a birthday without one.

Due to high demand, cake orders must be placed at least one month in advance through this order form.