Summary
- Sitting in Bars With Cake is a film about best friends Jane and Corinne who embark on a cake-baking quest to expand their horizons.
- Megan Potthoff, an experienced executive pastry chef, served as the food stylist and culinary producer for the film.
- Potthoff made over 100 cakes for the film, with each cake reflecting Jane’s growth and personality throughout the story.
Directed by Trish Sie and written by Audrey Shulman, Sitting in Bars With Cake will be available to stream on Prime Video starting Friday, September 8th. The film follows best friends, Jane and Corinne, who embark on a cake-baking quest after realizing that their homemade sweets can help them expand their horizons. However, right when everything begins to come together, Corrine is hit with a diagnosis that causes them to reevaluate their goals.
In charge of creating the multitude of cakes Jane bakes throughout the film, Megan Potthoff serves as the food stylist and culinary producer. Potthoff is an executive pastry chef with over 12 years of experience in the restaurant industry. However, Sitting in Bars With Cake is not her first production. Potthoff has styled for reality cooking shows such as Master Chef and Iron Chef, as well as the feature film Babylon. Yara Shahidi, Odessa A’zion, Martha Kelly, Ron Livingston, and Bette Midler make up the main cast.
Megan Potthoff chats exclusively with FilmmakerFocus about the culinary process behind the film and how Jane’s cakes reflect her growth. Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the film covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
Megan Potthoff Talks Sitting In Bars With Cake
FilmmakerFocus: You’ve styled for reality shows, and you’ve worked on feature films before, but what excited you most about working on Sitting in Bars With Cake?
Megan Potthoff: I think, number one, it was about cake. I used to be a pastry chef, so cake is definitely one of my specialties, but I also think that it was a very unique opportunity for a food stylist to be part of a project from start to finish. That was just a really cool thing for me. Normally when we do scripted things, we’re just there for the food. But this just so happened to be all about cake and cake being a main character. So it was exciting.
Did you make all of these cakes from scratch, or did you have a team behind you? What did this process actually look like?
Megan Potthoff: Most of them, yes, were made from scratch. All of the frosting I made from scratch because I felt like it was the easiest to control. And then I had a chocolate cake base I would always use, and it was very quick to put together, and then I had a vanilla cake base, and sometimes, for the spiced rum, we’d add a little spice, and we’d add some rum to it. But all of them were pretty much made from scratch.
Sometimes when we had really heavy cake days, we would outsource from a bakery for a blank cake, and then I could decorate over it. I had help on set. I’m just used to being a baker, so making multiple cakes—I could just hammer them out and do them myself. I’m just used to that. But I had people on set for me, so I could go and get the cake set up, and then I could jet back home and I could make cakes for the next scene. There were really only a couple heavy cake days when they were back-to-back. Most of the time, they were split up a little bit.
Do you know how many cakes you ended up making for the film?
Megan Potthoff: Yes. I counted. It was probably months ago when I was doing the counting. This is including all of the test cakes that we made and all of the trials, and we had a whole other shoot of cakes by de Lange that we made for de Lange’s cookbook. The total, with all the multiples we made, was a little over 100.
Obviously, art imitates life and Jane is very reserved. Did you want her cakes to not just show her culinary skills, but also give more insight into her personality?
Megan Potthoff: Yeah, definitely. We had a cake wall, which showed our timeline. That way, as we’re looking at it, we can see how the cakes sort of grow and adapt. She’s either becoming more adventurous with flavor or she’s becoming more adventurous with design. So as we continued and got into the later cakes, they became a little bit more adventurous, and we really just wanted to show that on camera.
This might be a hard question given how many you made, but do you have a favorite cake that you created?
Megan Potthoff: It’s so hard to answer that because I really have a connection to all of them because I poured my heart and soul into them. But the Chinese prune cake, which we only see quickly when they open the fridge, really resonated with me because it was a pretty shade of lavender with edible flowers pressed in the sides. I just thought it was a really elegant cake. But the licorice and leather cake, which I don’t think we really see whole, was also really fun to make because I was so intimidated by it, and then it became one of my favorites because it was so wacky and cool.
About Sitting In Bars With Cake
Inspired by true events, Sitting in Bars with Cake follows best friends Jane (Yara Shahidi) and Corinne (Odessa A’zion) navigating life in Los Angeles in their twenties. Corinne, the ultimate extrovert, convinces her shy-but-extremely-talented home baker best friend Jane to commit to a year of baking cakes and bringing them to bars with the goal of meeting people and developing confidence – also known as “cakebarring.”
During their year of “cakebarring,” Corinne receives a life-altering diagnosis, and the pair face a challenge unlike anything they’ve experienced before. Sitting in Bars with Cake isn’t only a madcap joyride through some of L.A.’s most colorful watering holes, it’s a moving celebration of female friendship, forging identity, and finding joy in the most unexpected places.
Check out our interview with director Trish Sie, as well.
Sitting in Bars With Cake will be available on Prime Video on September 8.
Source: FilmmakerFocus Plus
