Rise with the Sun Bakery: How Two Penn Students Launched a Dorm-Based Bakery
Pictures taken by Rosemary Yang, Natalie Cheng, and Alyssa Tang
Rise with the Sun Bakery launched in February 2025 during Valentine's weekend. Started by two sophomore Penn students, Rosemary Yang and Natalie Cheng, the bakery sells custom vintage-style cakes. While their standard cake size is 6" Circle 2 Layer, they have since expanded to cupcake and 4" Circle Bento Box Cakes. On the Rise with the Sun Bakery form, customers can specify the cake flavor, fruit filling, sweetness, color scheme, and decor. Those with a particular aesthetic in mind can upload “cake inspo” photos.
While they bake out of their dorm kitchen, their prices and products seem on par with Paris Baguette and Mason Sweet, Asian bakeries near Penn that I have previously frequented. Their Instagram, featuring past custom orders including heart-shaped baby pink Valentine’s day cakes, a Jellycat-themed cake complete with a kawaii face and legs, and a dreamy birthday cake featuring Snoopy peacefully napping on top, piqued my interest. I ordered a matcha bento cake with strawberry filling and pearl sprinkles at 70% sweetness. The cake was moist with a pronounced matcha flavor, and the buttercream struck that ideal balance of sweetness typical of Asian-style desserts. The decorations were adorable–both the box itself and the cake. The box came with two small wooden forks with a silky pastel pink bow tying everything together. came with a bow, and the cake itself. I was a bit surprised that the strawberries between cake layers were still partially frozen when I first tasted it shortly after pickup. However, by the next day, once they had defrosted, they added the perfect touch of tartness that complemented the matcha well.
I interviewed co-founders Rosemary and Natalie to learn more about the story behind their burgeoning student-run bakery business.
Q: What inspired you to start a bakery while in college and how did the idea come together?
A: This whole idea started when one of our roommates brought up that Wharton Women was looking for someone to make a cake for their event. She knew that we had experience so we decided to make the cake for fun. After the event, the board members really loved the cake and said that if we were to make a bakery, that they would support us. From there, we planned and designed our brand and officially launched our account in November, where we planned to start on Valentine’s day.
Q: What’s the story behind the name of your bakery?
A: This is actually a really funny story. So the both of us are Fuzhounese and during the fall semester we were sharing a room together. We wanted to reconnect with our roots and start learning more about how to speak our dialect. One of these “lessons” consisted of different food words, one of them being chicken. Natalie one night randomly heard Rosemary talking in her sleep, where she repeatedly said “chicken” in Fuzhounese. This became an inside joke between the two of us and when we were brainstorming ideas for potential mascots for our brand, the chicken came up. We thought that Rise with the Sun was the perfect theme that encompassed the symbol of a chicken, our identity as students, and the descriptive language of cakes. All three of these things rise (the chicken rises in the morning, students get up early for class, and cakes rise in the oven).
Q: What made you fall in love with baking/what do you love most about baking?
A: Rosemary: I’ve always had a passion for different types of art and love trying new things. At home you could catch me doing anything from oil painting to crocheting and have always been easily inspired by videos that I’ve seen on YouTube. After watching several YouTube videos and falling in love with cute cakes, I started off baking a cake roll. My parents, for the first time, really loved a dessert that I made, with the phrase “not too sweet” becoming an all too familiar compliment from Asian parents.
Natalie: I started baking bread and cookies back in quarantine! Rosemary was the one who got me into baking cakes last year when we were baking our friend’s birthday cake. My favorite thing about baking is learning new things.
Fun fact, both of us had a brief obsession with making nails and bought a bunch of materials to make them. But neither of us also ever wore acrylic nails so generally not very practical. It would also be difficult to sell because people have different nail sizes so at least with baking and having people who are interested, we wouldn’t be forced to eat them all ourselves!
Q: What’s been the hardest part about running a bakery as a student?
It’s definitely time management from balancing our busy student schedules, extracurricular activities, and bakery responsibilities.
Q: Do you see Rise with the Sun continuing beyond college?
A: We do not see Rise with the Sun continuing into the future. We both have very different career paths lined up! We really just did this fun!! (but if anyone is interested in taking over when we graduate we would not be opposed, training included)
Q: Do you two specialize in certain roles or do you work together for most of the baking, decorating and logistics of the bakery?
A: For general baking, we both do it to maximize efficiency! Like one of us takes the wet ingredients and the other takes the dry ingredients. As for decorating, most of the piping is done by Rosemary and Natalie does the 3D or 2D art! Rosemary does a lot of the financials and manages our TikTok and Pinterest. Natalie manages all the design graphics and client work via Instagram!
Q: How do you come up with new menu items?
A: We have been coming up with new menu items based off of the season like our flavor of the month. For instance, we did matcha madness for March and now we are doing orange citrus for April because it’s spring! We thought Flavor of the Month is a good solution for having different options but not having the inventory or time to offer multiple! Lately we have been adding things like cupcakes and bento boxes to reach more customers! This way, our menu can be new and exciting, even to our existing customers.
Q: Have you learned anything about business or entrepreneurship you didn’t expect?
A: One of the biggest things that we have learned is time management. Baking and decorating cakes is a huge time commitment. On top of this, we both spend a lot of time planning and managing our social media accounts and communicating with customers. We have also both learned how to be self-starters and we feel that this bakery has become a lot larger than we both anticipated.
Q: How did you decide on the recipe? Was it one that either of you had been using to bake prior to starting the business or did you work together to combine your tips and tricks to make the best cakes?
A: From our personal experience, our Asian parents are not huge fans of super sweet cakes. On top of that, we aren’t huge fans of American-style cakes with heavy buttercream frosting. We love Asian bakery cakes but have not personally seen a huge offering of customizable versions and wanted to be able to bring this to life through our bakery. Initially, we faced a lot of trouble with stabilizing the whipped cream, as we do not have as much flexibility with decorating as buttercream may offer, but overall we really love what we have been able to do and have learned a lot about recipe creation. We’ve tested a lot of different things and are constantly trying to make the recipe better!