Leaping Tall Pastries in a Single Bound:

Brooklyn's Own Superhero, the Cake Man of Fort Greene

[May 2004]

By Joshua Wolf Shenk

If you're looking for the Cake Man, hes not hard to find. Come to 708 Fulton Street in Fort Greene, next to Five Points Hardware store and across the street from J & S Tires. Smell for the lemon loaves, the cinnamon rolls, the chocolate icing, and the Cake Man's signature Southern Red Velvet Cake. He makes 40 Red Velvets a day.

It's a two-story place with an open balcony, more New Orleans in architectural style than brownstone Brooklyn. It's just the way the Cake Man likes it: Four years ago, when he came from Harlem, the building was a beat-up bodega without so much as a working gas line. The Cake Man made it his own, complete with a pale-wood and glass-brick facade, designed so that he can easily make a gingerbread replica of his own shop.

His full name is Raven Patrick De'Sean Dennis, III, but you can call him Cake Man.* (His close friends call him Cake. His grandpa used to call him Pancake.) When he was a boy, in Lynchburg, South Carolina, they used to call him Cake Boy, as in "There goes Cake Boy driving that old brown Corolla, delivering his cakes." When he graduated high school, the Lee County Observer said that the Cake Boy had gone and grown up and they were going to have to call him Cake Man.

After professional pastry training at Johnson & Wales in Providence, Rhode Island, Cake Man came to New York City. For nearly two decades, he worked from his apartment, at 668 Riverside Drive (at 144th Street). He lived on the fifth floor and borrowed ovens as needed from friends and family on the 4th and 6th floors.

The Cake Man was a fixture in Harlem and he left only after two great sadnesses. First, he was days away from opening a 75-seat restaurant in a building owned by his church, St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal. He was so close that he had souvenirs in hand for the opening and a permit to block the street, but suddenly the church took back the lease. Second, his father, Raven Dennis Jr., died.

The Cake Man had two fraternity brothers —  Trevor McKenzie and Jonathan Adwumi —  in the wedding business in Brooklyn. They'd been urging him to cross the East River for years. So the Cake Man set up on Fulton Street. He had a rented oven and no staff. "I was over here 17 hour days, 7 days a week," he remembers. It got so that his plants were dying and his fish were floating at the top of the tank. He gave up his apartment and slept in the store for a year and a half.

In Harlem, the Cake Man had been known for his signature yellow cake. "It's the plain old sweetbread we used to make down south," he explains. "I got to Brooklyn and Lori from the real estate office around the corner — Location Location Location —  she said, 'You from down south you should be able to make a Red Velvet cake.'

"I said, 'Red Velvet cake? Sure I make Red Velvet cake but nobody in New York eat that. They want yellow cake.'

"She said, 'You make a Red Velvet cake and I'll see to it that you get some business out of it.' I made a Red Velvet for her. She said, 'You sure is from down south. You sure put your foot in this.' One thing led to the next. People started coming wanting the red cake." Soon, they were standing in line.

The Cake Man's other specialty is pastry sculpture. He says he can make a cake into anything, and go ahead, take him up on it. He's made cake drums, cake handbags, and giant cake books. For the 120th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge, he built a replica of the great suspension bridge that was twelve feet long and seven feet tall. It fed 3,000 people. For Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's inauguration, he made a replica of Borough Hall — complete with a clock tower and a working clock. (Markowitz told Cake Man that the clock didn't even work on the real tower, but that he'd have to fix that so that Borough Hall could properly resemble its cake. Then he cut open the cake, straight through the front doors.)

Though his work is astonishing for its size and gumption, that's not what animates the Cake Man.. He likes to do something different and this is connected to his belief that everyone is special and worth celebrating. "When people come in and they want a cake for a party, I say, 'Name five things that you'll find in the room to see that that person has been in that room. Or five things on a table that you can say, 'This person has been here. I know he's been here.' And that way, when the person looks at the cake he'll say, 'Wow'."

Some people the Cake Man has recently made say, 'Wow': Pop star Mary J. Blige; Nets forward Kenyon Martin; poet Maya Angelou, and mega-preacher Juanita Bynum. The Cake Man's wall is his hall of fame. He's made cakes for Patty Labelle and Puff Daddy; for Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro. When the cast of "Sex and the City" wanted a special cake, they knew who to call. Same with Congressman Charlie Rangel.

The Cake Man's shop isn't exclusive, though. It feels warm and open – like a grandma's busy kitchen. This is the way the Cake Man likes it. He learned his art from his grandmother. And in Harlem, where he built his business, his neighbors saw him carting up boxes of butter and flour and carting down his cakes; his friends came over to talk trash, or to keep him awake. Everyone had keys to his place – even his barber – so they could come take a cake out of the oven for him. "I'm used to people being around," he says. "I'm used to people seeing and talking to me. Don't put me back in no kitchen by myself. I don't like the dark. And I don't like too much quiet."

"Ideally," continues the Cake Man, "I want my icing to be in my front window downstairs, so all the little kids can see the cakes being baked. They see men, women, all sort of cultures up here. Sometimes you grow up seeing Asian people do the dry cleaning, Greek people with the breakfast spots. We have the whole mix."

When people ask the Cake Man who he caters to, he answers, "I cater to the world. Whether it's gotta go to Sweden, whether it's got to go to Tokyo, whether it's goes to Beijing – look, that's where the cake goes. A woman took a cake to Singapore for Thanksgiving. She said, 'Cake Man will be alright?' Sure it's going to be alright. It gets there. One woman want a cake sent out to Alaska. It got there. The Red Velvet got to get there."

Now settled in an apartment in Crown Heights, the Cake Man is a Brooklyn fixture. He stayed open after September 11, 2001. After the blackout in 2003, he gave out slices of cake and glasses of water. An older woman recently told him, "You know what I told my daughter. I said, 'Bin Laden came. Cake Man was open. Lights went out. Cake Man was open. So I know Thanksgiving and Christmas he's gonna be open up in there by himself doin' them cakes too. Nothin' closes him down."

It's true. Last Thanksgiving, Cake Man stayed open all day, working the shop alone. On Christmas Day, he opened at 6 a.m. with fifty cakes and closed at 11 p.m. with none.

Staying open to the Cake Man is an imperative in more ways than one. He says he wonders about other people, "What are you closed for? Your gift is your gift from the great beyond. Your talent is your talent....  So many people are so closed. And they live in a box and can't see out of it. If you're tight with your talent and you're not going to share, you fall out and die here. Then it's, 'What'd you did? What legacy you left? Who knows where you been?'"

The Cake Man is 37-years-old, slim and handsome, with an accent that, as he puts it, "is as southern as South Carolina sun shinin' down there on that green grass." He now has a thriving business, with fourteen employees, ten of whom work full-time. He makes 60 cakes a day, plus cookies and brownies and Whoopie Pies (newly added to the pastry case by chef Kristyne Bouley) and other small stuff for people to eat with a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade. He does at least three weddings a weekend.

What does the future hold? He plans to keep his flagship in Brooklyn, but he's branching out, too. He's got a catering business in Charlotte, North Carolina and he wants to open a cake supply shop in his native South Carolina. In two years, he'll celebrate his 25th anniversary as a professional cake baker, and he hopes to produce two books: one with recipes and the other with his inspirations.

The Cake Man, who pumps gospel music while he bakes, says, "Anytime you do something that go get emotion from somebody, there has to be something spiritual. Whether they laugh or smile, you make people move. I would have never made it if I didn't have a higher up, an inner strength, and a power from beyond that says, 'Cake Man, wake up everyday and do something positive for somebody, not only yourself.'"

One last question: Would God call him Cake Man?

"Hey look out now," he says. "He may call me Pat like my grandma. I don't know."

* I recently read this article to the Cake Man, to check my facts and I asked him: "Is it Cakeman or Cake Man?" He said, "Cake Man." I said, "But it's Superman. It's Batman." And he said "Yes, but Cake Man is better for icing." I said, "You mean so you can break up the words on a cake?" And he said, "Yes." [BACK]