Get your tastebuds ready for the Sugar Rush festival

Various cupcakes, cookies, ice cream and other treats will fill the OC Fair & Event Center next weekend as Big Bite Events presents its first Sugar Rush Festival.

The event, scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in the Hangar building on the site in Costa Mesa, will feature more than 40 vendors from Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties, as well as musical performances.

Mark Entner, CEO of Big Bite Events, which started with the Big Bite Bacon Fest in San Diego in 2013, said the gatherings are what he considers “foodtainment.”

“We built a name for ourselves in creating a festival with really unique entertainment elements and programming that really paired well with the food,” he said. “We wanted to continue to build on that.”

Kelleigh Strobel, a spokesperson for Big Bite Events, said she and other representatives of the Santa Ana-based company, in selecting Sugar Rush participants, looked for variety of goods.

“For lack of a better word, we shopped some really well-known dessert artists in the area,” she said. “We were looking for really unique dessert items. We have a wide variety, from the favorite standbys, like cookies and cupcakes, and get into some really fun and unique foods, like the Nutella Cake Roll from Sunmerry Bakery and the original gelato flavors from Gelato Paradiso.

“We really sought out something for everybody. There are some really unique items here that people will enjoy.”

Sunmerry Bakery is an Asian fusion bakery in Irvine that opened in July. Gelato Paradiso has locations in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.

Peter Kao, general manager of Sunmerry Bakery, said guests will be able to create their own warm fillings for the custard buns, choosing from caramel, condensed milk, almonds and chocolate to blend with the custard. The crusts have their own specific flavors, including green tea and coffee.

The confections will then be baked in portable ovens on-site.

Kao said he hopes Sugar Rush will be a way to market the bakery to more people.

“Because we started in Taiwan, a lot of our customers are Taiwanese,” he said of the chain bakery, which has no other locations in California. “We want to reach out to the non-Asian communities. We want to present everyday ingredients, like Nutella, with our own baking techniques.”

Kao said that besides the custard buns, Sunmerry will also serve Nutella Roll Cakes and Pineapple Tart Cake Pops, which are a modern take on the traditional pineapple tart dessert popular during the Moon Festival, an Asian festival held in the autumn that celebrates the relationship between the moon and the water. The treats are dipped in chocolate and toppings like sprinkles and nuts.

Gelato Paradiso, which also has shops in San Diego, will sell about a half dozen unique flavors of gelato, including pumpkin, peppermint and egg nog.

Carla Landeros, manager of the Newport Beach location, said the frozen Italian dessert has less fat and fewer calories than ice cream. The gelato booth will also sell fresh waffle cones, she said.

“We’ve gotten really good at perfecting new flavors and coming up with new concepts,” said Landeros, who has worked for the company for 10 years. “We stay authentic to the original Sicilian recipes. We’re good at staying traditional as well as incorporating trendy flavors, like s’mores and pumpkin.”

Some treats will be adults-only, like alcohol-infused cake pops by Los Angeles-based company Drunken Cake Pops.

Activities will include the cookie bake-off for amateur and professional bakers and a sugar cookie display competition. A silent auction of the displays will benefit Share Ourselves, which provides safety-net services to the homeless and low-income populations in Orange County.

A portion of the event’s ticket sales will go toward the Costa Mesa-based Festival of Children foundation, which supports children’s charities.

Tickets are $10 for children and $20 for adults online and an additional $5 at the gate. The price of individual treats will vary.

Entner said he is looking forward to bringing Sugar Rush to Orange County.

“We want to give everyone in Orange County a great experience where they’re able to come and see all the different desserts, chefs and all the unique creations and get some ideas for the holidays,” he said.