Sugar Rush Bake Shop opens in Greenlawn

For Jeanne Purpura, it’s all about the flowers. Her custom cakes are crowned with a profusion of blooms, they cascade down the sides, anchor the bases. She’s drawn to densely petaled flowers like peonies and hydrangeas but roses are her favorite, and her specialty.

"They are the hardest to make," said the baker, surrounded by the tools of her trade at her tiny, four-month-old shop in Greenlawn. "You start from the inside and work your way out to outer petals. And to make them realistic, they can’t be too perfect."

Piping roses — forcing the icing through the metal tip of a pastry bag to create individual petals — is time consuming, but she finds it therapeutic. Of course it’s also a relief when a cake requires her to create berries, leaves or even easier flowers like pansies or hydrangeas which rely less on piping skill than on filling the pastry bag with multiple shades of icing to mimic their mottled coloration.

Cakes start at $175 for a six-inch cake and she has customers sending drivers from Manhattan and the Hamptons to pick them up. For local customers who just want something sweet, she makes a variety of humbler, less expensive cookies, brownies, cupcakes and biscuits that recall her original repertoire when, a decade ago, she launched Sugar Rush.

Singapore-raised, Centerport-based Purpura started her culinary career in restaurants, cooking at the now-closed Felidia in Manhattan before moving to Long Island to raise a family. In 2015 she began selling tarts, quiches, galettes and cookies at farmers markets in Port Jefferson and Sayville, often using produce from her fellow vendors. Within a few years, she had developed enough of a customer base that she gave up her market stall. Posting her creations and taking orders on social media became her modus operandi.

During the pandemic, she dipped her toe into the custom-cake game. And it was flowers from the get-go. "I was never interested in those novelty cakes that look like bags or shoes or cars," she said, "I don’t work with fondant." (Fondant is the nominally edible mixture of sugar, water, gelatin, shortening and glycerol that handles like modeling clay and is used to give "theme" cakes their preternaturally smooth finish.) She’s still embarrassed about her first, clumsy attempts at flowers but it wasn’t too long until the cakes took off and bold-faced names (whom she can’t disclose) began ordering everything from simple layer cakes to multitiered wedding cakes.

Last year she realized that she could no longer run her business from her own kitchen and so she took over Greenlawn’s former Kava Girl. Most days she can be found baking but, on Saturdays, she opens to the public with a selection of cookies ($10 for six), vanilla custard and dark chocolate tarts ($10), brownies ($6), poundcake ($3 a slice), madeleines ($1), buttermilk biscuits ($3) and other humble but delicious treats. Of course, you can also order a spectacular cake.

Sugar Rush Bake Shop, 71 Broadway Greenlawn, Instagram: @sugar_rush_bake. Open most Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (check Instagram)