When Morgan Knight’s favorite restaurant in New York City relocated to a larger space, she said it felt like kismet. After months of searching, the 24-year-old baker found the perfect storefront and is transforming it into Saint Street Cakes’ flagship store, set to open in late June.

Knight, the founder of Saint Street Cakes, graduated from Northeastern in 2022 with a degree in political science. She began her baking career during college, and what started as a side hustle has since amassed over 100,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. Saint Street Cakes is best known for its Lambeth-style decoration — a vintage piping style characterized by intricate details.

“She was baking every single day,” said Peri Griffiths, one of Knight’s roommates at Northeastern. “It kind of started with one a week, a couple a week and then by the time we were graduating, it was like at least one cake every day. Now she makes like 10 cakes a day. She would make a bowl when she would be trimming the cakes and there would be little bowls of cake scraps that we would get to eat all the time.”

Knight founded Saint Street Cakes in 2021 after she posted a photo of a cake she made for her roommate’s 21st birthday to Instagram. Soon after, she started to get requests from friends to make cakes for their events. Named after their shared apartment on St. Botolph Street, the business rapidly gained popularity on social media and found a loyal customer base. 

“At first, it was selling to friends and friends of friends, and then very quickly it was just selling to strangers in Boston,” Knight said. “I started getting random brand deals for social media. It was kind of out of my hands very quickly in a really fun way.”

“Morgan is miraculous, and she can do three full-time jobs at once,” said Sara Chen, another college roommate. “I’d always seen her dedication to the work — she was up at insane hours baking cakes, stayed up late prepping them — so it always felt like a full-time thing. It was just a matter of when it would fit into Morgan’s life to turn it into a full-time thing.”

Following graduation, Knight worked as a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York for over a year before leaving to pursue baking full time.

“I had taken a look at my order forms and saw that I was rejecting 20 to 30 people a week,” Knight said. “I realized if I was able to take all of those orders, I’d be making more money and figured I’d be interacting with more people, I’d be more creative — I’d like it more than the career that I saw for myself in law.”

Dan Urman, the director of hybrid and online programs in the Northeastern School of Law, was a professor and mentor to Knight  during her undergraduate years. Urman encouraged Knight to pursue her passion for baking instead of going to law school. While transitioning from paralegal to entrepreneur is an unconventional path, Urman said Knight’s legal background sharpened her attention to detail and gave her the necessary skills to succeed in business.

“In her marketing, she’s been really smart, and law is about carefully using language and being creative,” Urman said. “So I think [Saint Street Cakes] will take off just like it has in the past and continue to grow when there’s a store.”

In addition to baking for birthdays, weddings and other events, Saint Street Cakes has baked for numerous brands and celebrities, including Billy Joel, MAC Cosmetics, Tory Burch and Olivia Rodrigo. No matter the buyer, Knight always makes sure each cake is tailored to each customer’s request, never replicating anyone else’s work.

In preparation for her June opening, Knight is balancing orders and content creation with renovating the storefront. Although Saint Street Cakes is a “one-woman show,” Knight said the support of her friends and family has been incredibly valuable. Her parents — a contractor and a designer — have flown back and forth from Los Angeles to New York City to help her with the store.

“She’s probably the one person I know who can do this,” Chen said. “It’s a culmination of her determination, her creativity, her craftsmanship — she’s painting and she’s working to curate every element of this bakery in some ways that I wouldn’t even think of just as a bakery consumer, like making sure all the cups and everything is sourced from vintage stores that fit her aesthetic. Everything is so creatively aligned, and it’s so fun to see both on social media and as her friend.”

As Saint Street Cakes expands to a physical location, Knight is hiring three founding team members with pastry experience to help run the bakery.

“I’m very excited to be building a small team,” Knight said. “I think the scariest part of being a business owner is, at some point, you have to let someone raise this child that you’ve brought up with you; that’s the only way it’ll continue to succeed.”

For Knight, the most rewarding part of Saint Street Cakes is interacting with people, and she is excited to make her work more accessible with the brick-and-mortar store by selling individual slices of cake in addition to full-sized cakes. 

“I’ve just been working at my apartment, so I’m not always interacting with people unless I’m doing a pop-up,” Knight said. “But even just like building a storefront, I’m [at the store] almost every day painting or building things, and people knock on the door or read the little QR code and wave, and I’ll come out and say hi and talk to them a little bit about Saint Street.”

Knight also teaches cake decorating classes with RecCreate Collective and plans to continue teaching, including smaller private classes in the sunroom of the bakery.

“I can see it being a Brooklyn staple,” Griffiths said. “I think people will know who she is pretty quickly. I think it’ll become one of those spots that’s on lists of like, ‘Top bakeries you need to visit in Brooklyn.’”

While Knight has veered from her law career path, she’s not giving up her political aspirations. One of her goals is for Saint Street Cakes to be involved in grassroots activism, whether that means campaigning for a mayoral race or participating in community food programs. With the storefront and with every cake she makes, Knight hopes to make people’s lives sweeter.

“She embodies the best about Northeastern,” Urman said. “She’s smart, hardworking and creative. So I think her story is the Northeastern story.”