Dessert lovers have another sweet treat to enjoy at UC Riverside: Dining Services is now offering custom-made cakes baked fresh on campus.

The cakes are available to order online through Sweet Tooth Bakery, the name used for baked goods made at the Glasgow Residential Restaurant and provided to other campus dining venues.

Allison Eagan, who oversees the bakery at Glasgow as the executive pastry sous chef, said she and her team of bakers wanted to provide students, employees, and families an opportunity to order cakes for special occasions like birthdays and graduation. It’s ideal for parents who may be far from campus and want to place an online order that the student can pick up, she said.

The cake service began with a soft launch at the beginning of February with the first cakes provided to customers by the end of the week. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the bakery offered a heart shaped “Be Mine” cake that proved popular.

The new service began with minimal advertising — a sign at Glasgow and posts on Instagram — and had 33 orders in its first week, Eagan said.

Cakes are available in six-inch and ten-inch sizes for $14.99 and $24.99, respectively. Customers can choose from four different cake flavors, seven fillings, five frosting flavors, and five decorative designs to create a cake to their liking, adding a custom message if they would like. 

Cake flavors include chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet while buttercream vanilla and strawberry are some of the fillings available. Frostings include chocolate and cream cheese. The bakery also offers vegan and non-dairy options. In addition to birthday and floral designs, a special blue and gold UCR-themed decoration is among the choices.

“It’s always been a big dream of mine to start a cake program here,” said Eagan, whose interest in baking began with a job as a cake decorator at Baskin Robbins when she was 18.

She recalled mentioning her interest in starting a cake program to Lanette Dickerson, executive chef and culinary director, back in 2012. 

The bakery has been able to expand its offerings largely due to the opening of Glasgow in fall 2020, where the baking staff have their own spacious, 1,395-square-foot kitchen with three countertop tables, five ovens, a walk-in freezer, and a storage area.

With more than three times the size of the space they had at the old Aberdeen-Inverness restaurant, the bakery changes its menu regularly, making hundreds of different kinds of cookies, puddings, bars, croissants, muffins, donuts, and other treats, including vegan choices. 

Since 2022, the bakery has added a little more each year including the launch of Sweet Tooth, packaging its baked goods for sale at campus cafes and Scotty stores. Making cakes is a more involved process as each is made from scratch with several steps starting from making the mix to baking to decorating. 

The cake service allows the team of bakers to utilize their cake making experience and be creative with the presentation of different colors and flavors, Eagan said. She hopes to expand flavors and decorations, using UCR-developed citrus and more elaborate edible designs, as the program continues.

“I’m excited to show off the talent the bakery staff has,” Eagan said.

UCR may be among the few college campuses to bake custom cakes from scratch for order, said Eagan, who has toured other campus culinary operations.

“It feels so good to see our vision, the things we want to do for our students and the campus community, realized,” she said.

Visit the Sweet Tooth Bakery ordering page for more information on the cake service.