Amirah Kassem

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Amirah Kassem is fearless. “I go back to Mexico and hang out with my cousin and her pet wolf.” She shrugs. “It’s no big deal. My uncle used to have a lion.” Beasts of prey are one matter, but the 28-year-old New Yorker has taken on the one thing many folks consider the greatest scourge of our time: sugar. As the proprietor of the custom cakerie Flour Shop, which she founded more or less on a whim out of her Brooklyn apartment in late 2012, Kassem has emerged as the premier pusher of sweet treats to New York’s art and fashion scenes. Her signature six-layer rainbow cake is the anti-green juice. “I use real butter, real sugar. No substitutions,” she says. “People always ask, ‘How can you have a business without doing gluten-free?’ And I’m like, ‘If you want that, go somewhere else.’ What I do is give people a chance to relive their childhoods—those colors, those flavors.” Kassem says this, it must be noted, as she tucks into a scoop of cookies-and-cream ice cream covered with rainbow sprinkles. It’s 11 a.m. and we’re the first customers at Sundaes and Cones in the East Village. “My attitude is, if it’s a special occasion, splurge. Be happy.”

Kassem is certainly no stranger to downtown’s kale-heads and detoxinistas. Prior to launching Flour Shop, Kassem was the right-hand woman to BLK DNM’s Johan Lindeberg back when she began selling colorful cake pops at a friend’s coffee shop. Demand skyrocketed, and a business was born. Terry Richardson was one of Flour Shop’s first customers, ordering pies for a shoot. These days, Kassem boasts a private clientele so VIP she won’t even talk about it (google Instagram + Flour Shop + Blue Ivy, if you must), and she usually delivers her orders in person.

All of which would make for just another girl-opens-cupcake-shop story were it not for Kassem’s gleefully wackadoodle sensibility. In November 2013, she and the art photographer Henry Hargreaves staged the gallery exhibition “C.R.E.A.M.: Cake Rules Everything Around Me,” paying homage to the Wu-Tang Clan with cakes that looked like buzzing beehives, frosted swords, and take-out containers of lo-mein. The duo also paired for the art project “Burning Calories,” which consisted of photos of guilty-pleasure food such as hot dogs and hamburgers set ablaze. “People are always talking about ‘What’s the fastest way to burn calories?’ So Henry and I were like, ‘Just set them on fire.’ ” This past April, for the Brooklyn Museum’s Artists Ball, Kassem made giant gumball mosaics riffing on Takashi Murakami’s poptastic flowers. Her next art-world gig takes her to MoMA, where she and “Love Me” tagger Curtis Kulig will be collaborating on a food-based installation event set for March 2016. “Curtis’s work is about love and happiness, and mine is, too, in a different way,” Kassem says. “I’m not sure what we’ll do yet. It’ll probably be a big smiley face.”