Once Upon a Cupcake

A Short(crust) History of the Coterie of Cakes

Also known as: The Cakers, the Sugar-Addled

Once upon a time, Fernwick the pixie flitted merrily through the Feywild, as light and carefree as freshly sieved icing sugar. Life was grand and full of fairy nonsense: oh, just the usual enchanted glades, damsels in distress, mischief under the moonlight, and most importantly, an endless supply of fairy cakes. Oh, the cakes! Cakes with colour-changing lavender icing, biscuits which leaked honey fruits, sponge so delicate it evaporated in your mouth, leaving only the taste of sugar and dreams, and pies so sweet they’d make a night hag weep for joy.

But all good things, as the saying doesn’t go, occasionally go catastrophically wrong. One day, while sniffing out new ingredients, he came across a curious sight—a house, but it was a house built entirely from cakes and biscuits. The walls were Victoria sponge layered with raspberry jam, the roof was made of gingerbread shingles, and the chimney puffed out clouds of meringue. It smelled so sweet, so divine, that the pixie couldn’t resist flitting closer.

“Would you look at that! A house made of cake!” he gasped to nobody in particular, his eyes wide and wings buzzing with excitement, already imagining the delights that might be stored inside.

Of course, he didn’t stop to wonder why anyone would build a house out of baked goods in the middle of a forest filled with hungry creatures. His sugar-addled mind clouded all sense of caution as he darted forward, to lick the frosted windowsills and nibble the biscuit tiles.

And then suddenly and frankly predictably, a magical net of sticky dough fell on top of him, clogging his wings and wrapping him up like a neat lattice pie. What the greedy pixie hadn’t noticed was the obese sweet hag watching him from the shadows, her wicked grin spreading as wide as a chocolate cat who just snagged a sugar mouse. Her teeth were in terrible shape, of course.

“You little cake sniffing thief!” cackled the witch, stepping out from behind a candied bush. Her name was Griselda Crumble, and it turns out she was notorious for her culinary sorcery. She wasn’t just a dab hand with a wooden spoon—she had magic that could bind, proof, transform, and curse, all through the power of pastries. And now, she had one more faery at her mercy. “You’ve chewed on my home, berk, and for that, you’ll work off your debt in my bakery! Forever!”

Griselda clapped Fernwick in manacles made from rock-hard stale doughnuts, and locked him in a sugar cage. It turned out Griselda have quite the little army of baking slaves already, all fellow faery creatures she’d ensnared in a similar way. Each day they would have to grind wheat to flour until their hands were raw, mix batter until their little muscles burned, and risk life and limb in the wickedly hot oven.

At first, Fernwick thought it wasn’t so bad. The pixie loved cake, after all. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, the novelty of baking for a barmy, sugar-hungry hag wore off quickly. Griselda wasn’t just obsessed with cake—she craved dominion over all baked goods. She imbued her creations with cruel magic, using them to control creatures of the fey forest, and lure mortal children to their doom.

Her grand plan? To use the faeries’ baking prowess to create the Cake of Domination, a confection so powerful that it would bend all creatures in the forest to her sugary will. And then… well, who knows what dark schemes she had beyond that?

The faeries knew they had to escape before the infernal cake was finished, but they were stuck—bound by enchanted chains and trapped in a kitchen surrounded by animated cutlery that obeyed only the witch. That is, until Fernwick came up with a cunning plan.

“We’re faeries, for Titania’s sake,” he muttered one night, “Between us we’ve outwitted trolls, tricked dragons, and turned princes into frogs. Surely we can outsmart one old cake-obsessed witch.”

The others agreed, and they hatched their plan. They would create a decoy cake—one so magnificent, so tantalising, that Griselda wouldn’t be able to resist devouring it on the spot. But this cake would have a secret ingredient: tooth fairy sleeping dust, and enough of it to pacify a Jaberwock. They set to work. The cake they baked was a thing of beauty: towering layers of sponge, dripping with honeyed frosting, and topped with shimmering candied violets. But hidden deep inside the patisserie was the fairy dust.

Greedy Griselda fell for their ruse, hook(ed-nose), line and sinker. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” With a horrid cackle, the hungry hag gleefully gobbled a huge slice of the cake. The fey folk watched on for a tense few moments before the hag belched loudly, yawned, and crashed to the ground, before snoring so loud the gingerbread roof tiles rattled. Fernwick and the others seized their chance. Knowing their fairy stories well, they bundled the slumbering witch into the oven, before closing the door with a clang. Unfortunately, for both faeries and Griselda, the witch’s long nose got caught in the door as it slammed shut, waking her!

“Leb me ow at onth, you flour-fathed foolth!” she shrieked as the fey-folk fanned the fires to heat the oven up and gathered up all the cakes they could manage to liberate from the sugar shack. When bleary-eyed Griselda realised mercy was not going to happen, instead she uttered a terrible curse upon the brave band of faeries. Quite how it was worded, they couldn’t really tell, what with the nose and the flames and the screaming. Something about never tasting the cakes of the Feywild again? But as the motley crew made their escape through the doughnut door of the hut, with biscuit bricks falling and frosting splattering everywhere behind them, they rapidly realised something had gone terribly wrong.

To bake, or not to bake…
…what a leatherheaded question.
—Pipkin, Brownie Caker

Unhappily Ever After

Rather than appearing in Griselda’s garden of treats, the faeries instead tumbled through the doughnut door and found themselves sprawled in dingy, soot-streaked streets. The sky was a dull grey, curving overhead in a way that made their heads spin. Sigil the Cage, the city at the heart of the multiverse, surrounded them in all its grime and chaos.

Fernwick groaned, picking bits of crushed meringue out of his wings. “This… this isn’t the Feywild,” he muttered.

“No kidding,” said Pipkin the brownie, scowling as he wrung custard out of his tunic. “Where in the Nine Hells are we?”

The scents were all wrong. The air reeked of rust and soot, not the loud, colourful smell of their homeland. Worse yet, there wasn’t a crumb of cake to be found. Hardly even a stale biscuit. The faeries wandered the grim streets of the Lower Ward in shock, their glittering wings dimming as reality sunk in. They were stuck. Stuck in a city where doors didn’t open unless they felt like it, and the only bakeries they could find served bread so dense it could be used to club a troll to death.

For days, they flitted about the burg in search of a way home. Pipkin, known for his cleverness, tumbled to the dark that joining one of Sigil’s factions might help. Surely, with the right allies, they could return to their realm of cake and chaos?

They approached the Sensates first, drawn to their promise of indulging in every sensory pleasure. The faeries explained their plight, going on about the endless banquet of fairy cakes they longed to return to. The Sensates, however, seemed more interested in eating rare creatures and exploring the taste of fear, and turned up their noses at the idea of endless buttercream and sugar flowers. “Too whimsical, very cliché,” they sniffed. Rejected, the faeries moved on.

Next came the Mind’s Eye, but when the fey folk asked if ascension could involve some sort of divine patisserie, they were swiftly shown the door. They tried the Harmonium, but apparently the Hardheads didn’t see the connection between multiversal peace and a well-executed lemon drizzle. The Bleak Cabal simply asked them if cake was even real. “The cake is a lie,” mumbled one despondent Bleaker, as he gnawed on a piece of bread so dry it crumbled to dust.

None of the factions wanted them. Desperate, hopeless, and still hungry, the fey band sat huddled in a dirty Hive Ward alley, their wings drooping, their spirits low. It was then that Fernwick, once again, had an idea. “What if,” he whispered, eyes wide, “the meaning of everything is cake?”

The others stared at him, uncertain if he’d finally gone barmy or if he was on to something big. “We could make it a… belief. A faction! If no one else will listen to us, we’ll bake our own!” Fernwick declared, his wings fluttering with excitement. “We’ll make Sigil the new home of cake. We’ll start our own bakeries, fill the streets with frosting, and spread the truth of baked goods far and wide. No one will ever question the power of patisserie again.”

And that day, the Coterie of Cakes was born.

The Proofing of a New Philosophy

Their philosophy was simple, yet profound: the multiverse itself was made of cake. Every plane, another layer of cake, forming one multi-tiered confection perfection. From the sugary-sweet Celestial Angel Cake to the wickedly rich, dark fudge of the Abyss, it was all cake. Life’s only true purpose was to indulge in as much cake as possible and to defend the sanctity of baked goods across all realities. The pursuit of cake wasn’t just a joy—it was the ultimate truth. A flaky, buttery, sometimes fruit-filled, and usually fattening, truth.

The Cakers began to proselytise on Sigil’s streets, handing out edible flyers covered in frosting and preaching that the answers to all existential questions could be found in a slice well-baked sponge. “It’s cake or chaos!” they cried. Let’s just say, amongst the notoriously cynical Cagers, eyebrows were raised.

Surprisingly, they did actually attract a few followers. A starving former Xaositect joined up, claiming he had always felt that some planes had a certain crumbly texture. A tiefling from the Lower Ward, who’d worked in a bakery all her life, found solace in their teachings, her whisk now became a symbol of devotion. Very slowly, the faction grew, always in odd directions.

Cake is life,
therefore
life is cake.
— Core Belief of the Cakers

However, something dark brewed under the surface. The faeries had a motto: “No bad cake shall survive.” What started as a whimsical distaste for poorly baked goods slowly morphed into a fanaticism none of them had expected. One day, a poor clueless berk strolled by their Great Bazaar stall and made the fatal error of mentioning he preferred pie to cake. A silence fell. Marnie the redcap stared at him with wide, glittering eyes. “What… did you say?” she whispered, voice trembling with suppressed rage.

The next day, there were whispers in the streets. The clueless was never seen again, but rumour had it that he ended up inside the next batch of “Death by Chocolate” cake. The Cakers began talking about “culinary purity”—only the finest cakes could be tolerated. Anyone found guilty of burnt crusts, soggy bottoms or, powers forbid, using margarine instead of butter, would be swiftly dealt with. Their faction had become… militant. The fakery creatures, once carefree and harmless, started to become an unnerving presence in Sigil.

The dark atmosphere of the Cage, and lingering after-effects of Griselda’s curse brought out the more malevolent and capricious side of the fey folks. Over time, more Feywild exiles found the group and the balance of power shifted from cake-loving faeries to ever-more sinister fey. Fernwick’s personality became more subdued and withdrawn, and his schemes more addled and desperate. While he started the faction, he’s not the leader any more, it’s devolved into a chaotic band of mostly-barmy fey with their own addled agendas. Hiding out in Undersigil, the Cakers are few in number and largely forgotten by the folk of the Cage, who frankly have equally as weird things to worry about every day. The Cakers are more a bedtime story these days, whispered about by tiefling mothers to their young children in an attempt to make them behave. Unfortunately, they’re a story based in truth…

More on the Faction

Once Upon a Cupcake — you are here
The Philosophy of the Cakers — a Harmonium threat assessment
Cake Cutters — key characters of the faction
Cake, Glorious Cake! —the musical

Canonical Sources:

Coterie of Cakes: Turn of Fortune’s Wheel [5e] p18-19; Sigil and the Outlands [5e] p57.
Sweet Hags: Monster Core [PF2e] p189

Canonwatch: The Planescape [5e] books introduced the Coterie of Cakes as rather a comedy ‘faction’ and I must admit my first sensation was a taste of bitterness. However, while making the song ‘Cake, Glorious Cake!‘ for them, I started to think about a back-story that could explain them, and landed upon the fey. I hope you enjoy!

Source: Jon Winter-Holt