It Took 105 Cakes to Make Sitting in Bars With Cake

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.