Micki Boden knew exactly what she wanted served at her wedding, and it wasn't a towering, frosted confection. It was the coffee cake she grew up eating in Los Angeles Unified School District cafeterias, a humble sheet cake with a cinnamon-streusel top that she calls her favorite dessert of all time. So she did something few people think to try: she asked the school district to bake it for her big day.
“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said, according to LAist. Boden's own LAUSD education took her through elementary school in Studio City, middle school in Sherman Oaks, and finally a high school diploma from a campus in Reseda, the outlet reports. By the time she was planning her wedding, the cake wasn't just a craving — it was tied to years of memories as an LA student, Boden said.
From a Recipe Found Online to a Call to the District
Boden had tracked down the district's official coffee cake recipe online, but she wasn't confident she could pull it off herself, so she reached out to LAUSD directly to ask for help, per the same LAist report. That call eventually reached Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative for the district, and Manish Singh, LAUSD's director of food services. The two arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake.
Singh was blunt about how unusual the request was: the district doesn't normally take cake orders from the public, he said, but made an exception in Boden's case. According to Singh, the goal was simple — making a former student's special day a little sweeter. The Mulholland Middle School chef went a step further than just baking the cake, shaping part of it into a heart for the couple.
A Wedding Built Around Frosting-Free Favorites
Boden and her now-husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality show Big Brother, started dating afterward, and got engaged in 2025, the article notes. Neither of them liked frosting, and traditional tiered wedding cakes never appealed to them, which made the plain, unfussy coffee cake feel like the obvious choice. With Stollman's family flying in from the East Coast for the October wedding, the couple wanted to hand them a distinctly Los Angeles experience.
They held the ceremony at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys and leaned even further into local flavor by hiring an In-N-Out truck to feed guests. Between the burger truck and a school cafeteria classic reimagined as a wedding dessert, the day doubled as a tour of San Fernando Valley comfort food.
A Cake With Roots Back to 1954
The coffee cake itself has a long institutional history. Its recipe dates back to 1954 and has been adjusted repeatedly over the decades to comply with federal USDA regulations, according to The 74. The outlet reported that LA Unified serves roughly 800,000 slices of the cake every year across 700 cafeterias, and that Singh said it's still made from scratch in 25 to 30 school kitchens.
Demand for the cake can be intense: the district once ordered 3,500 pieces for a staff appreciation day, and The 74 reported it was all gone in no time. The 74 also reported that a coming recipe change would cut sugar.
A Recipe With a Cult Following Beyond One Wedding
Boden isn't the only Angeleno with a fixation on this particular cake. Los Angeles Unified posted its official coffee cake recipe online, and the district tweeted it during the pandemic, per The 74's reporting. Los Angeles Magazine, published April 8, 2020, said the district tweeted it “this afternoon.” Years before that, Barbara Grinage baked her own version of the cake for an episode of her YouTube series in 2018, according to Los Angeles Magazine. For Boden, though, the cake wasn't just nostalgic internet content — it became the centerpiece of her wedding, baked by the same kind of school kitchen that fed her as a kid.
