QUEENS — Coffee lovers with a sweet tooth will get a chance to indulge at a Forest Hills bakery this weekend.
Silk Cakes, known for its elaborate wedding confections, will team up with Stumptown Coffee Roasters on Saturday to offer free coffee-and-cake pairings designed to bring out the best flavors in both.
“We want to enlighten the foodie palate,” said Judy Lai, the founder of Silk Cakes. “The foodie palate is much sharper and they will appreciate all the different ingredients.”
Lai said experts from Stumptown Coffee visited the bakery last week and tasted the cakes, then came up with three pairings.
Guatemalan coffee was matched with Thai tea cake with condensed milk buttercream, Ethiopian bean coffee was paired with yuzu cake with green tea buttercream, and Indonesian coffee was paired with pandan cake with coconut whipped cream.
During Saturday's event, Stumptown experts will also demonstrate "the intricacies of how the Stumptown coffee is brewed,” Lai said. Free samples of both coffee and cake will be available, Lai said.
Silk Cakes, which opened its first, appointment-only bakery on the Lower East Side in 2006, launched its retail store in Forest Hills earlier this year.
Lai, whose parents came to New York from Hong Kong, said that in designing her cakes, she likes to use Chinese letters and shapes common in Asian art, such as koi fish.
She also uses a number of Asian ingredients, including green tea, black sesame and Japanese lemon.
The pairing event will take place on March 15 from 1 to 3 p.m. The bakery is located at 98-14 Metropolitan Ave.
