THE STUDIO AND THE ARTIST
About Sugar Couture
THE STUDIO
Sugar Couture is a New York-based bespoke sugar and pastry art studio with decades of experience producing edible art at the highest level of craft. From branded installations and large-scale corporate commissions to retail programs and private celebrations, the studio brings the same obsessive attention to detail to every project, whatever the scale. American Express, Nintendo, Tiffany, Macy's, Sony, and Madison Square Garden are among the brands that have trusted Sugar Couture to make something genuinely special. Every commission, corporate or intimate, is made with the same conviction: that sugar is a serious medium and every piece deserves to be unforgettable.
THE ARTIST
Meet Penny
FOUNDER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Before Penny Stankiewicz ever picked up a pastry bag, she was in a documentary film edit suite, building stories frame by frame. That background traveled with her into the pastry kitchen and became her superpower: the deep research, the hunt for the perfect visual language, the relentless commitment to a single cohesive narrative.
A graduate of both NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and the Institute of Culinary Education, Penny occupies a rare creative space: one part fine artist, one part culinary professional, all storyteller. The combination has made her one of New York's most distinctive and in-demand pastry artists, and the driving creative force behind Sugar Couture since its founding.
Her culinary career began with a pivotal detour. While producing Absolute Wilson, a critically acclaimed feature documentary on avant-garde theater visionary Robert Wilson, she enrolled in ICE's Pastry & Baking Arts program on a creative whim. The whim stuck. She graduated, took a position in the pastry department at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market under acclaimed Chef Pichet Ong, and realized that everything she loved about filmmaking applied with breathtaking directness to sugar: the obsessive attention to detail, the drive to make something that moves people, the hunger to get it exactly right.
Sugar Couture was born. High-profile clients followed quickly.She approaches every commission, from a 500-guest corporate gala centerpiece to an intimate birthday cake, with the same methodology: become a miniature expert on the subject, immerse in the details, then execute something that feels genuinely impossible.
Every piece is original, designed around each client's brief, aesthetic, and occasion, and built to a technical standard that holds at scale. A corporate commission for a major brand event and a bespoke wedding cake receive the same rigor, the same attention to detail, the same insistence on doing it right.
Penny is a recurring featured chef on Epicurious's wildly popular 4 Levels YouTube series and has appeared on Food Network's Ridiculous Cakes, where she produced some of the largest and most technically demanding cakes of her career. She teaches in the Professional Cake Decorating program at the Institute of Culinary Education, and has also taught at the 92nd Street Y, Sarah Lawrence College, the International Culinary Institute, and De Gustibus Cooking School at Macy's Herald Square.
Her entrepreneurial achievements have been recognized by the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses/Tory Burch Initiative, and in 2020 she was inducted into Les Dames d'Escoffier, one of the most prestigious women's culinary organizations in the world. Sugar Couture is a woman-owned independent studio built on craft, originality, and a point of view that has never wavered.
Her favorite cake is still the one she hasn't made yet.
Penny's work has been featured in New York magazine, on the Food Network, Epicurious, Heritage Radio Network, and across national and international media.
WORK WITH US
Every project begins with a conversation.
Penny wants to understand what success looks like for you: what the piece needs to do, who it's for, what it has to feel like. Sugar Couture takes on a selective number of commissions each year to ensure every client gets the full attention the work requires.