Sorry to bring you more sad closure news, but The Cake Gallery — the small but scrappy 9th Street cake bakery known for X- and R-rated custom decorations as well as photo-reproduction cakes of all kinds — has permanently shuttered after 38 years in business.
48 Hills editor Marke Bieschke posted a photo from a friend of the sign in the bakery's window this week which says, "Thank you for 38 years... We hope the best 4 our customers and neighbors during these trying times."
Yelpers have also confirmed the closure, though the business's website has not yet been updated with the news. WARNING: Some NSFW cakes below, but is anyone actually at a work computer??
Five years ago, Hoodline profiled the bakery's owner of 20 years, Jerry Carson, a former cab driver who purchased the business in 1995. The original owners of the bakery were a gay couple, one of whom died in the 1980s, Carson said, and the other subsequently moved home to Louisiana. Carson has for 20 years overseen the business and served as its delivery driver, while employing a baker and two cake decorators.
In addition to the more pornographic cake offerings that sometimes got requested for adult birthdays, the bakery thrived with a wide range of custom requests including reproducing children's drawings for their birthday cakes, and portrait cakes of all kinds — done with the aid of airbrushes and a projector. The bakery also did the kinds of 3D cakes in the shape of other foods like burritos and steak, now especially popular via Food Network shows.
The Cake Gallery was one of those quirky, legacy SF businesses that was always a delightful surprise when you passed it while walking up 9th Street, tucked into an unassuming storefront. And like so many of its kind, it is now gone, leaving a void to be filled by other custom cake decorators and edible porn purveyors.