Pastry Buffet cluster kit

The Tray – four keys from a bakery case

The idea came from customers who had been asking for a set. Not one keycap, but a group – something that read as a composition on the board rather than a single accent. Arrow keys and WASD both made sense architecturally: four keys in a cluster, enough space to build a scene. A pastry tray gave us the frame. Once we had the frame, the rest followed.

The tray comes in two finishes, both cast in resin. One reads as brushed aluminum foil – the crimped edge, the ribbed sidewall, the way the rim catches light differently from the floor. The other reads as foam packaging – matte white, soft-cornered, the kind of tray a bakery puts a single pastry in before sliding it into a paper bag. Neither is the material it appears to be. That’s the point: resin stable enough to survive years on a keyboard, wearing the appearance of something that was never meant to last past breakfast.

Two pastry designs run across both tray types. The first is a glazed donut – white cream glaze over a golden base, chocolate drizzle across the top. The second is a ganache mound: dark chocolate cream piped onto a white base, with caramel pooling at the edges. On the WASD set, neither design is freeform. The donut is shaped into the letter of its key. The ganache is piped into the letter of its key. W, A, S, D – each one legible in pastry, readable on the board as a legend that happens to be made of chocolate.

Each keycap is built from separately cast components and assembled by hand. The pastry body, the tray, the glaze or ganache layer, the drizzle, each element cured individually before joining. A single pour flattens everything into one layer. The multi-step process is what produces the depth visible in the photos: the way the cream sits above the tray floor, the way the drizzle catches light differently than the glaze beneath it.

The final layer is a thin resin membrane cast over the entire tray – flat, slightly irregular at the edges, catching light the way stretched film does over a container. It reads as food wrap without being one. Getting the thickness right took several attempts: too thick and it reads as a lid, too thin and it loses the transparency that makes the pastry below visible. The version that shipped sits at the depth where the resin disappears and the illusion holds.

This is Jelly Key’s first kit. Every cap is still handmade entirely, no injection molds, no 3D printed with paint applied afterward. The price is what it is because we wanted the people who had been asking for a set to be able to order one without thinking too hard about it.