She Made a Cake for Olivia Rodrigo. Now She Has Her Own Brooklyn Bakery.

Eater

08-07-2025

is a born-and-raised New Yorker who is an editor for Eater's Northeast region and Eater New York, was the former Eater Austin editor for 10 years, and often writes about food and pop culture.
Growing up, Morgan Knight was taken by the desserts in hand-drawn movies by Disney and Studio Ghibli: from the wedding cake from The Little Mermaid to the broom cake in Sleeping Beauty and the breads of Kiki's Delivery Service. 'I loved seeing something drawn as a cartoon and being like, 'That is what I want to make,'' she says.
That's what led the former political science and law student to pivot into making cakes and eventually start an Instagram cake business in 2021. As of last month, her business has expanded to include a bakery of the same name. Saint Street Cakes opened in Fort Greene at 86 South Portland Avenue, near Lafayette Avenue, on Wednesday, June 25.
Saint Street Bakery's menu is simple, offering cake slices and other baked goods. Knight's cakes, as she describes them, 'lean on the moister and denser side' and are 'not too sweet' while still laden with house-made buttercream. The slices include almond cakes with pistachio-lemon buttercream; carrot cake with cream cheese frosting; and double-chocolate cake with berries and chocolate buttercream. There are also miniature cakes and, yes, cake martinis — trifle-esque layers of cake and frosting in a large stemmed cocktail glass. Here, she'll sell a mix of premade cakes as well as custom orders.
In New York, Instagram cake makers are now so en vogue, there's even a whole magazine for them. In the same vein as the animations Knight grew up with, her cakes have a more classic, old-school, wedding cake piping style — distinct from a wave of goopier, wackier cakes that also dominate online. Saint Street also sells other baked goods, like salted chocolate chip cookies, lemonade-lavender loaves, and miso peanut butter cookies. 'American dessert classics but with some fun mixtures in there,' she explains.
Knight is particularly proud of the vegan and gluten-free offerings she strives to include, like the Girlfriend brownie (the name is a play on its lack of gluten).
'Letting chocolate exist and be the main star of the show is something that I just really love,' she says. 'A good quality chocolate just tastes so good, and it's a really interesting thing to try to build upon it. Gluten-free desserts thrive when they're entirely flourless [...] things that are amazing not despite the fact that they're gluten-free, but because they just happen to be.'
The space includes a view of the cake decorating station, a pastry case with a counter, and a small sunroom with a few dine-in tables. For drinks, there are coffee, teas, and refrigerated beverages. Knight plans on adding weekend tea parties eventually.
The dining area of Saint Street Bakery. Saint Street Bakery
Knight studied political science and law in college in Boston and interned at the U.S. attorney's office during the pandemic. At school, she made a friend's birthday cake, which she posted on social media. People immediately asked where she placed the order. 'Saint Street was born on its own,' she explains. It started off with baking for friends and friends of friends, and then she opened it up to strangers through Instagram. She maintained the bakery through college — the name is in honor of where she lived with friends — and then moved to New York, where she was a paralegal during weekdays and baked cakes on the weekends.
Saint Street grew to the point where Knight was baking for brands like Tory Burch, but she realized she was leaving money on the table by turning down so many orders because of her full-time job. 'I realized financially I could quit my job, but I had an internal conflict. What career choice do I want? Do I want to go to law school because that was the plan after my two years as a paralegal, or do I want to just focus on cakes?' she questioned at the time. Ultimately, she decided to go all-in on cakes in October 2023.
The sweets business continued to flourish to the point where Knight was commissioned to bake the cakes that pop star Olivia Rodrigo smashed on Saturday Night Live and bake an album celebration cake for Suki Waterhouse. But there was still something missing. What Knight loves the most about desserts and cakes is 'the community aspect of it and food bringing people together,' she explains, but she wasn't getting that through the Instagram service model and working out a commercial kitchen. There was the pricing too: 'It's been hard to grapple with the [fact] that the only way that someone could try anything I made was if they had like upwards of $100 to spend on a cake,' she said.
Knight wanted people to be able to partake in her baked goods on an everyday basis at more accessible prices than the custom market made sense for. 'I really love the idea of partaking in something together and enjoying it together in celebration,' she says.
Saint Street Cakes is the manifestation of 'a cool artsy grandma with a lot of stories,' Knight says, with 'the welcoming nature of what cake is, then mixed with really classic flavors and a really funky exterior. It's just making cakes that taste as good as they look.'