Everybody loves cake, right? Cakes have layers. Mmm…. cake! We’re sure you’ll also love PiBakery, a brand new way to bake Raspberry Pi images, which makes creating a custom image a… piece of cake.

PiBakery was created by David Ferguson. He’s a talented 17-year-old whom we first met at the Big Birthday event we held to celebrate four years of Pi back in February. He showed Liz and Eben a work-in-progress version of PiBakery, and they’ve been raving about it ever since.

This crafty program enables users to mix together a customised version of Raspbian with additional ingredients, and you need absolutely no experience with computers to set up your custom image.

In PiBakery, you drag and drop blocks (just like Scratch) to add extra components. PiBakery then mixes the latest version of Raspbian with its additional sprinkles, and flashes the result directly to an SD card.

“The idea for PiBakery came about when I went to a Raspberry Pi event,” says David. “I needed to connect my Pi to the network there, but didn’t have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I needed a way of adding a network to my Raspberry Pi that didn’t require booting it up and manually connecting.”

“PiBakery solves this issue,” he explains. “You can simply drag across the blocks that you want to use with your Raspberry Pi, and the SD card will be created for you.”

“If you’ve already made an SD card using PiBakery, you can insert that card back into your computer, and keep editing the blocks to add additional software, configure new wireless networks, and alter different settings,” says David. “All without having to find a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.”

PiBakery is available for Mac and Windows, with a Linux version on the way. It can be downloaded directly from its website. As well as the scripts and block interface, it contains the whole Raspbian installation, so the initial download takes quite a while. However, it makes the process of building and flashing SD cards remarkably simple.

David has written a guide to creating customised SD cards with PiBakery. It’s a very easy program to use, and we followed his guide to quickly build a custom version of Raspbian that connected straight to our local wireless network. Guess what: it worked first time.

Behind the scenes, PiBakery creates a set of scripts that run when the Raspberry Pi is powered on (either just the first time, or every time it is powered). These scripts can be used to set up and connect to a WiFi network, and activate SSH.

Other options include installing Apache, changing the user password, and running Python or command line scripts.

The user controls which scripts are used with the block-based interface. You drag and drop the tasks you want the Raspberry Pi to perform when it’s powered up. Piece of cake.

We love PiBakery, and cake. Did we mention cake?