Inside Dessert Goals, the happiest food festival in Brooklyn

Is it possible to love an event about dessert more than dessert itself? This is what we’re asking ourselves after experiencing the low-key magic that is Dessert Goals, Brooklyn’s festival for all things sweet.

Back for an encore last weekend after its debut last fall, Dessert Goals is still wildly popular with all 2,000 tickets selling out in just minutes — yet the event had the mellowness and good vibes you want to help your sugar buzz along.

“We wanted to keep it manageable,” says co-founder Liang Shi. Vendors were limited to 20 inside the small Dobbins St. warehouse and on its rooftop, where Gummy Bear-shaped inflatable chairs, a free candy bar by Dylan’s and palate-cleansing savory treats also beckoned. Attendees were spread out among several 90-minute sessions over two days, so there were virtually no lines, with time to try everything (tickets were $20, with pay-as-you-go treats).

“It’s just enough that you’re feeling hyper and excited, and then you’re ready to leave,” Shi says.

For the Instagram set, there was a flower-strewn candyland of a backyard full of photo ops. But refreshingly, that’s not what most people opted to do. Pairs of friends, mothers and daughters, couples and more were busy chatting, eating and scoping out their next dessert discovery.

The whole event had the personal touch of Shi and Miraya Berke, who wanted to create an extension of what they love to do together. “As friends, every time we’d get together we’d go for dessert,” she says. They took their idea to Facebook and used the avid response to assemble the Dessert Goals roster. Shi designed the pins and the embroidered jackets worn by event staff, called the Dessert Squad.

Maybe we ate too many unicorn macarons, or being surrounded by smiling people in New York worked us over, but Dessert Goals now sounds less like an easy pop culture reference and more like a call to action: Grab someone you love and go enjoy the sweet life.