Lyndsay Sung makes delicious, delicious cupcakes. Lyndsay is both striking and timeless with her brownish-brown eyes, lemon complexion, and petit fours. Such a sharp palate in such a smooth and pretty Chinese face! Lyndsay is also capable of an infuriating attention to detail and strives for the same unhurried perfection in icing, ice cream, pizza crust and cakes shaped like hamburgers. Lyndsay cares a lot, about colours and quality and people. And children, who are also people, like the fans of her hilarious concept band Guimauves. She also likes cats (Taco "Chubchub" Sung Trawick, RIP), and probably dogs? Definitely poodles.
--C.Min
The Proof
01 I start my day off with a darkly steeped tea which powerjams my morning into outer space. Once it’s supersteeped I fill it right up with soymilk and it makes it cold. Then I drink it along with eating a bowl of…
02 Oatmeal! Oatmeal with frozen berries, then fresh berries if I have ‘em, a good sprinkle of cinnamon, walnuts or almonds, dried cherries and some organic coconut curls. I start my morning off right but usually ruin my food day later by eating 2.5 cupcakes or so.
03 This is the 1950s detective glass style door in my kitchen, the place I work and create in. I spend a lot of time chained to the oven in my kitchen baking cakes, not unlike a Marina Abramovic performance piece. Swing this door to the other side and you have my work station, my trusty Mac computer where I spend many hours editing photos of cakes and writing about cakes and blogging about cakes!
04 This is my black hair, shiny and black for now, but also there are little silvery white hairs trying to piledriver their way into my life. I pluck those away with strong disdain/a sense of depression mixed with “I earned those” pride.
05 A Truman the Dog cake and a regular sized hot pink rosette buttercream topped cupcake. I love making animal cakes, but I feel pre-sad thinking about them getting their face all sliced up and eaten. Even though it’s to celebrate a birthday it’s still sad to think about their sliced up cake face.
06 I love vintage-look cakes, and vintage things in general! So my caking style reflects this sometimes, such as this white all-over piped cake with tri-tone pink cake layers I made. This cake reminds me of one of those old-school Barbie Doll cakes where her poofy petticoat dress is a cake piped all crazy-town like this cake is but there is a Barbie Doll jammed into the top.
07 Caking and art play strong roles in my life, as does music. I think of my life in music as a sinewave. Up and down, static sometimes and vanishing other times. I have no idea if I’ve just described a sinewave so music tech nerds, don’t playah hate me. This is a picture of my friend Rafael and I’s conceptual performance music duo Guimauves performing last year at Collage Collage. Currently I am playing bass guitar in a new loud-ish, heavy-ish band with some excellent ladies.
08 The guy behind the watermelon face is the sunshine of my life.
The Questions
What neighbourhood do you live in?
I live in the Commercial Drive neighborhood in East Vancouver. Among the delights that make it what it is: Remnants of Little Italy staying strong, dogs ‘n dykes, dollar slice pizza wars, streetcorner drugdealers, drunks in the park, cheap and plentiful grocery stores, mommies and strollers, strange anachronistic mediocre-food restaurants, and nutritional yeast trails from Drive Organics. Did I mention medieval-kilted hacky-sackers carrying large sticks in the park, and pop-up shops (lay your stuff on a blanket and sell it) before they were cool?
What do you do and where?
I am a self employed cake machine called Coco Cake, and I also teach art part time to hilarious and bright but sometimes crazy children at Arts Umbrella on Granville Island.
What are you working on?
I’m always working on a custom cake or set of cupcakes for an order, or I’m mentally constructing or decorating the cake in my mind. When I’m not baking, making and decorating cakes, I am photographing them and writing about them for my blog! I’m also working on a cake book with Vancouver’s utterly adorable Simply Read books.
Where can we find your work?
Online at www.cococake.com or www.cococakecupcakes.blogspot.com. Or at your buddy’s wedding, or someone’s art opening or at a kid’s 1st birthday party on the dessert table!
