Cake Craft

Cake Craft is a cooking game about one cake at a time, and doing it properly. The guest at the counter hands over a picture, and the picture is the brief: three layers of chocolate and strawberry, dusty rose frosting with drips, a shell border, six berries, two macarons and a silk bow on top. You work through the benches in whatever order you like — the oven, the turntable, the frosting, the piping bag, the tray of trimmings — and the cake on the stand is always the cake you have actually made, not a progress bar.

Every step is a gesture with a number behind it. A tin goes in the oven and there is a golden window of about a second and a half; pull too early and the round sinks, too late and it cracks. Layers are dragged onto the turntable, and where you let go is where they land, so a careless stack leans and has to be nudged back straight. Frosting is laid on by dragging round the spinning cake — moving slowly piles it on thick, a second pass scrapes it level, and a dwell at the top rim sends a drip down the side. A faint guide shows where the piping goes, and the bag lays down exactly where your hand went, wobble and all. The score at the bell reads all of it: flavours, bake, straightness, coverage, smoothness, trace accuracy, whether the trimmings match, and how much patience the guest had left.

Four regulars come in — a grand lady with a small dog, a birthday child, a nervous groom and a food critic who takes notes — and the days keep bringing things: new sponges and frostings, rosettes and zigzags and draped swags, a second oven, two-tier cakes, writing in icing, an airbrush, three tiers and a display cabinet. Each day ends with a report worth one to three stars and a handful of in-game coins, which buy a convection fan, an offset spatula, a steadier hand, velvet chairs or an apprentice who bakes the bottom layer for you. There is also a free-bake bench with no clock and nothing to match, where you build whatever you like, keep it on a shelf in your browser and save a picture of it. Play with a finger or with the keyboard, in portrait or landscape; progress is kept in your browser.