Best New Bakeries: Paper Cake Shop and Little Jaye

ByAllecia VermillionAugust 30, 2023

The Keel Bill cake from Paper Cake Shop.

Image: Amber Fouts

As Rachel Yang and her husband, Seif Chirchi, clawed their way out of the 2020 restaurant shutdown, she started making desserts again. Things were still too uncertain for the couple to hire back a proper pastry department in their restaurants, Revel and Joule.

Coming in early mornings brought back memories of when the couple opened Joule in 2007. Yang handled pastry back then, too. It was just her, alone, in the original location on 45th Street, making ginger cake and “joule box” semifreddo desserts.

Paper Cake Shop's two-layer sheet cakes pack all the acid, texture, and flavor balance of a savory meal.

Image: Amber Fouts

“It brought me back to the place where it was really nice and peaceful,” she says. Unlike many of the challenges that come with running a pandemic-era restaurant, prepping dessert was fun. Along the way, says Yang, “I fell in love with this whole idea of cake.” Specifically with treating this particular confection as a recurring form of happiness, not something you only eat on your birthday.

Meanwhile, across town and a year later, Charlie Garrison began making biscuits. It was a bit of a departure from his regularly scheduled programming as co-owner of Lady Jaye, a barbecue restaurant and meat shop that smokes anything from pork belly to delmonico steaks. On Sunday mornings, Garrison’s takeaway biscuits and gravy became a staple for customers shopping the West Seattle Farmers Market outside Lady Jaye’s door.

“And then I was just like, ‘I can make some muffins,’” Garrison recalls. “Really big muffins.” The baking of oversize goods escalated from there.

This fall, Seattle welcomes two of the coolest bakery projects it’s seen in a while. They both come courtesy of longtime savory chefs performing a buttery sort of culinary cross-training. Each one began as an outlet of sorts. Yang and Garrison’s culinary chops reside mostly on the savory side, which seems to let them approach dessert from a different perspective than someone who spent their career perfecting caneles and pain au chocolat.

In late summer, most likely September, Yang will open Paper Cake Shop at 4106 Stone Way N in Wallingford. Her partner, Gabby Park, joined her from the illustrious Saint Bread bakery, but the two met at Yang’s former restaurant, Trove. Park worked pastry at the stylized Korean barbecue restaurant, even ran the soft serve truck physically embedded in the restaurant’s entrance.

Chef Rachel Yang (right) rediscovered the joy of cake with help from baker Gabby Park.

No fancy layer cakes here. Paper Cake is exclusively a domain of sheet cakes—the sturdy hero of kids’ birthday parties and Costco bakery orders. But in the hands of these two chefs, they become two-layer melodies of Asian flavors and Western staples. Park might pair vanilla cake with a lemongrass soak and lychee custard. Not to mention lots of raspberry buttercream, its bright pink surface a canvas for both whole and crumbled Froot Loops and dots of blackberry jam. Other cakes might deploy ube mocha, doenjang maple crumbs, unapologetic whimsy, bright color, miso curd, and chocolate sour cream frosting.

Growing up Korean American, Park absorbed a dessert philosophy that shies away from sugar overload. “There’s a joke within the Asian community—the highest compliment you can get is for someone to say, ‘it’s not too sweet.’” She designs her cakes accordingly, thinking about factors like salt and acid as much as sweetness and texture.

Charlie Garrison's Sunday popups at Lady Jaye pack more confections than many brick-and-mortar bakeries.

Image: Courtesy Evan Carter/Lady Jaye

Cake may be the only sweet thing you can’t find at Lady Jaye on Sunday mornings. Charlie Garrison’s dalliance with biscuits and muffins has turned into an astonishing weekly buffet of big-personality baked goods. People line up outside the meat restaurant’s front door to buy shokupan doughnuts, enormous cookies, lemon loaf, pork belly bread pudding, and an assortment of rice krispiestreats that includes one made entirely of potato chips. Biscuits now come flecked with white cheddar or dotted with jam.

Bakers with more classical training might prioritize French tradition over a menu of playful stoner fantasies. “I come from the side of the grandma-style stuff,” Garrison says of his confections’ indelicate nostalgia. The spread is impressive; so is his willingness to arrive at 2:45am on Sundays to make roughly 400 treats in the kitchen of a barbecue restaurant. Garrison’s experience with meat makes him averse to baking anything the day before. “It doesn’t get any better than when you pull it off the smoker, it rests properly, and you slice it fresh.” Cookies, to him, are much the same.

Garrison's biscuits and cookies—soon to be found at Little Jaye Cafe and Bakery.

Image: Courtesy Evan Carter/Lady Jaye

Somewhere around the second week of September, Garrison’s weekly onslaught of pastries will get its very own shop. Little Jaye Cafe and Bakery in South Park’s Cloverdale Business Park will offer a daily dose of s’more rice krispies treats, blondie bars, and biscuits. Not to mention breakfast and lunch sandwiches (most likely heavy on meat from Lady Jaye) and coffee made with a machine from Mavam Espresso, a business park neighbor.

If Yang’s savory-chef status helped her find art in the humble sheet cake, Garrison’s background in meat cookery informs his view of what pastries deserve our reverence. “I’m trying to embrace stuff we can claim as real American cuisine,” he says. “I’m never going to make croissants—even though I love croissants.”