A restaurant in Tehran,
a kitchen in Toronto

I ran a restaurant in Tehran for years before moving here with my children. It was a bigger operation than this one — more covers, more staff, more noise — and I loved it, but it was a business of volume. What I wanted to build next was the opposite.

CakeHub is what I built next: smaller, slower, and entirely by hand. There is no shop. There is no counter, no display case, nothing sitting on a shelf waiting to be bought. Everything is made for one specific day, for one specific person, and then it is gone.

I take a limited number of orders each week — two to four — so that nothing leaves this kitchen that I would not put on my own table. That is not a marketing position. It is simply how many cakes one person can make properly in a week while also designing them, answering enquiries and driving across the GTA to deliver.

People sometimes ask why I do not scale it, hire a team, take more orders. The honest answer is that the thing I like about this work would not survive it. I like knowing whose birthday it is. I like being told that the cake was the thing the grandmother talked about. I like driving it there myself and seeing the room it is going into.

The trade is that I cannot help everyone, and I book up. If you are planning a wedding, that means months rather than weeks. If it is a birthday cake, five days is usually enough. Either way, ask — the worst that happens is that I am honest about not having the slot.

فارسی صحبت می‌کنیم

I speak Farsi, and a good number of my clients prefer to plan their cake that way. Either language is fine.