New June, Philly’s vintage cake specialist, opens a bakery in Brewerytown

New June, the Instagram-born bakery that brought striking vintage-style cakes to Philly — and subsequently swept national media with appearances in Architectural Digest, the New York Times Magazine, and Food & Wine — will open a storefront in Brewerytown this Saturday. The bakery and cake studio will have retail hours twice a week and will also host New June’s popular cake-decorating classes.

New June specializes in buttercream-bedecked cakes decorated in the Lambeth style, meaning they’re crammed with piping details and layered with carefully blended colors. And while the cakes look like technicolored Victorian-era dreams on the outside, they’re modern on the inside, in flavors like cardamom pistachio cream and olive oil-pumpkin chocolate chip. The bakery’s offerings during its Friday and Saturday retail hours will include miniature vintage cakes, cake slices, cookies, pies, cheesecake, and frosted quick breads (New June’s dubbing these “breakfast cakes”; think pistachio-rose semolina olive oil cake or banana tea cake with salted caramel and tahini cream cheese frosting).

Launched by Noelle Blizzard in 2021, New June started as a way for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) marketing veteran to occupy herself during a trying time. “It was largely as pandemic therapy,” Blizzard remembered while sitting inside the new bakery, painted in on-trend colors (Honorable Blue, Demure Pink). “I had a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old. I was baking with Margaux strapped to my chest.”

Though Blizzard doesn’t have any formal culinary training, she comes from a food-centric family. “My mom’s a big baker... she makes very elaborate cookie boxes every year, and we’ve been her little elves every Christmas making these cookie boxes since I was a little kid ... so I already knew my way around baking and cooking.”

During the pandemic, the hobby intensified. “I became really obsessed with baking content online first and kept building listicles of what I wanted to bake next,” Blizzard said. She worked her way through the Tartine cookbook and made Claire Saffitz’s malted brownies and Melissa Weller’s croissants. After venturing into sales to raise funds for Bakers Against Racism, she started making custom cakes.

New June’s early cakes took inspiration from London baker Claire Ptak — frosted simply, decorated with fresh flowers — but the bakery arrived at its now-signature style in fall 2022, when Blizzard got an order for a small, vintage-style wedding cake, an emerging internet trend at the time.

According to Blizzard’s own account, that first cake wasn’t her finest work. “It was really hard,” she said. “I did not have a natural knack for [the piping].” She kept at it, and “by the time Valentine’s Day [2023] came around ... it was just a boom. The mini vintage heart cakes — vintage cakes in general — just became everything that we did.” Blizzard says that no other Philadelphia spot had filled that niche quite yet, which helped pave the way for New June’s success locally. But the bakery has gained a national reputation by mastering the aesthetic.

By 2022, Blizzard’s colleagues at PHS had encouraged her to take the next step, making the business more than a side hustle. “The VP and my boss were like, ‘You’re in the newspaper, this is obviously successful, and you’re great at what you do [here] ... but I think you’ve started a real business.‘”

Blizzard left her longtime job that February, and hired her first part-time employee in the fall. In the spring of 2023, she moved the at-home business to Kismet Bagels' Fishtown kitchen, then graduated to a larger commissary space in Bridesburg’s BLDG 39 in 2024.

That’s been the base of New June’s operations until recently, but the now six-person team — three cake designers, two bakers, and an admin, all full-time — will have room to stretch out starting this month. The 900-square-foot space in Brewerytown, formerly Over the Moon Ice Cream, is equipped with several work tables, three electric convection ovens, and “fabulously big refrigerators,” as well as a couple display cases to showcase their retail selection.

After Saturday’s debut, retail hours will be Fridays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The staff is ramping up production ahead of the storefront’s launch, but New June will almost certainly sell out, given the seemingly bottomless demand from bakery-crazed Philadelphians. (The city is currently enjoying a wave of brick-and-mortar bakery openings, including Mount Airy’s Downtime Bakery, Queen Village’s Majdal Bakery, and Kensington’s Dreamworld Bakes.) “The whole process of just opening and getting approved and the timeline and all of that is already so stressful that I just said to my team, ‘We’ll prep what we can prep, and as soon as we’re open, we’ll scale from there, we’ll figure it out,‘” she said.

The mother of two likens the brick-and-mortar build-up to a third pregnancy. “Those last three months that you never want to happen to you ever again, it’s so traumatic, but then ... everything after it is so amazing and sort of wipes out [that feeling],” Blizzard said. “I’ve been clinging to that. This is hard, this sucks, this process is grueling. My hair is falling out. I’m so stressed, but everything after this can only be better, right?”