Ashley Huston’s Dreamworld Bakes is a standout West Philly micro-bakery

The cakes Ashley Huston creates as Dreamworld Bakes pop on your phone screen and your plate. She’s one of many amateur and professional bakers who launched micro-bakeries and custom cake side hustles during the pandemic, but no one in Philly is baking quite like her.

“Ashley draws you in with glitter and color and style, and then you’re like, this is truly one of the best doughnuts I’ve ever had,” said Dayna Evans of Mount Airy’s Downtime Bakery, who recently teamed with Huston for a pop-up at Riverwards Produce in Fishtown. “It’s the intersection of being extremely unique and stylistic in the presentation but delivering on flavor.”

Give Huston a prompt — key lime, carrot cake, or even a color combination — ”and she makes this amazing architectural, visually interesting cake with a ton of flavor,” said chef and organizer Katie Briggs, who cooks under the name Eclectik Domestic and often works with Dreamworld on pop-ups and events. (Huston’s larger Instagram presence is Dreamworld Makes, but her bakery is Dreamworld Bakes). “When I commission her for cakes, I can tell her a genre and she’ll be creative with it.”

She transforms celebratory cakes into canvases with vivid buttercream squiggles, handfuls of edible flower petals, and juicy portions of fresh fruit. Whole Oreos might rest beside pink glitter-dipped golden berries and spiky blue sea holly blooms on a white chocolate-frosted black cocoa cake. Her Cosmic Brownie, an olive oil fudge base topped with bergamot-infused ganache, gets its name from an iridescent topping of sugar pearls, sprinkles, and edible glitter.

“This is art, and looking at it, I want it to be a piece of me,” Huston said. “Like, ‘I know Ashley made that.’”

Now, she’s making it easier than ever to get your hands on a box of Dreamworld goodies. Huston just launched the Dessert People’s Club, a membership featuring monthly boxes of her bakes. Each drop features five items from her rotating menu: March’s will include guava hand tarts with cream cheese icing and a sprinkling of beet dust; key lime cheesecake with blackberries, gingersnap crust, and key lime curd; and a banana-cardamom cake layered with cereal milk custard, orange curd, and espresso buttercream that she’s dubbed Breakfast of Champs.

“I always wanted to work in food and bake,” she said. “I didn’t go to school for it, and I was told not to go in that field and do something more practical with my life.”

Huston moved to the Philly area when she was 5 years old. After earning a bachelor’s in business at Temple University and working as a bank teller, she headed to Tanzania as an education volunteer with the Peace Corps. But when she returned in 2016, she decided to follow a long-held dream. While working the line at various Philly restaurants and teaching herself pastry techniques, she began baking on the side.

In 2018, Huston became manager and then a baker at Franny Lou’s Porch in Kensington, eventually becoming a part owner in the business. Amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, she leaned into her side gig, branding the project as Dreamworld Bakes. By early 2022, a disagreement among the owners had escalated into a legal dispute, and Huston decided to dedicate herself to baking full-time, popping up at cafés and beer gardens and posting monthly menus of cakes, cookies, doughnuts, and hand tarts on Instagram.

And Dreamworld has grown. Last year, Huston began wholesaling her cakes and sheet cake slices to both locations of independent grocer Riverwards Produce. In February, she and Briggs collaborated on a two-week residency at Kensington’s Mural City Cellars. The pink-tinged, glitter-adorned tasting menu allowed Huston to flex her savory chops; she prepared a crisp-edged 15-hour confit potato and collard greens made rich with smoked turkey necks to complement Briggs’s red wine-braised short rib entrée.

“I was pretty blown away by her savory capacities,” said Briggs. “I think she has a really amazing culinary vision. She wants to, as one of my chefs said, fight for the food — for it to be the way that she sees it.”

As she’s seen the response to her work — from her Instagram followers and satisfied customers — Huston is energized. “I’m giving it my full attention and treating it as my only job. And it’s been really great — it’s growing a lot,” she said. “Hopefully it keeps going, because I want to see how far I can take it.”