Cake not hate: the father and son combating the far right with sweet treats
Dan and Josh Harris have dedicated their weekends to fighting Islamophobia, one cupcake at a time
It’s a Saturday morning in Peterborough and 12-year-old Josh Harris stands at the kitchen table with his father, Dan. Josh is clad in a red apron, piping bag in hand, an excited smile on his face. It looks like a regular father-son baking session, but the cupcakes have a bigger purpose.
For most people, weekends are a time for a lie-in, doing errands and catching up with family and friends. But Josh, who is autistic and non-verbal, and Dan have spent the past couple of months baking and delivering cakes to mosques and other places of worship across the UK. Posting their visits on social media, the goal is simple — to counter racism with sweet treats.
“What has really struck me is how wrong the far-right narrative has been around mosques,” says Dan. “When I’ve gone in, people have been bending over backwards to accommodate and make sure Josh is happy.”
The idea for their project, Cake not Hate, came in October when worshippers at a local mosque in Peterborough were abused by an intruder during fajr prayers. A man was charged at Huntingdon Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to religiously aggravated harassment.
Disturbed that the incident had taken place so close to his home, Dan decided to do something to show that the local Muslim community is accepted and valued by the majority of people in the town. Josh has always loved cooking as a way of communicating, so they settled on using food as a way to bring people together.
“We wanted to go into the mosque and show them that these guys don’t represent the great British public,” says Dan.
Those sentiments, however, were not shared by everyone. In addition to the many messages of support, Dan explains that their first mosque visit in Peterborough “set off a wave of abuse online. People were trying to find out who my employer was and me and Josh were threatened.”
In the year to March 2025, the Home Office has recorded a 19% spike in hate crimes directed at Muslims. Rising prejudice is not limited to race and religion, either. Dan runs popular TikTok and Instagram accounts, where he raises awareness about autism by documenting daily life with his son.
A few weeks before the Peterborough mosque attack, people across the country began hanging St George’s flags from lampposts and painting red crosses on roundabouts and pedestrian crossings. Dan posted a short video online asking them to stop defacing the crossings for reasons of safety.
“Josh is a very visual learner,” he explains. “He knows that the only safe place to cross is where there’s loads of clean white lines. The video went viral and there was a lot of far-right hate saying that [Josh] shouldn’t be alive.”
By contrast, Dan and Josh have been welcomed with open arms by the faith communities they have visited around the UK.
“I’m not a religious person,” says Dan. “But I took a lot of comfort in how the Muslim community views Josh very purely. I contrasted that with the hate that we got from the far right and there was a really stark dichotomy between the two sides.”
So far, Josh and Dan have delivered cakes to mosques and gudwaras in Birmingham, Leicester, Luton, Dunstable, Cambridge and most recently, London, where they visited visit to East London Mosque in Whitechapel. Their posts, which often show Josh dressed in clothing appropriate to the religious communities they are visiting, have attracted invitations from hundreds more.
One viewer, Tariq Kazi, reached out to praise Josh and Dan’s work recently and ended up arranging a late-November visit to his local congregation at London Central Mosque in Regents Park — one of the largest Muslim places of worship in the UK.
There, Josh happily handed out cupcakes to children and adults and stood with the congregation for the zuhr prayer. Dan chatted to worshippers and both had a chance to catch a quiet moment of reflection in the prayer hall.
For Kazi, the highlight of the day came when most of the cakes were gone and Josh came over and gave him a high-five.
“Seeing him acknowledge me that way made me think I’ve done something right today,” he says. “There was a very warm, positive reaction, and a lot of smiles. Seeing Josh approaching with innocence and trust and openness, but also seeing the dedication and support that Dan has as a father, was a very beautiful thing.”
