Fancy Instagram Cakes Are Everywhere Now. But Are People Actually Eating Them?

Everywhere I scroll I see cake. Dried lavender and eastern hemlock branches jut out between spiny swirls of vegan lavender Prosecco buttercream. Durian cream cheese rosettes frame edible photos of the original Gossip Girl cast. And then there’s a Hobbit house constructed from vanilla, chocolate, and matcha buttercream, studded with edible pearls and dehydrated kumquats.

These are just a few of the weird and wonderful cakes I’ve admired through my phone screen over the past year. And all of them are created by a cohort of independent bakers who’ve racked up tens of thousands of social media followers based entirely on their unconventional creations. From the opulently frosted to the freakily jellied, many of these cakes don’t advertise their deliciousness in the same way as those featuring juicy pools of strawberry compote or a fluffy carpet of whipped cream cheese. Yet these subversive sweets are highly coveted by a certain set of pastry lovers who yearn for a custom cake more unexpected than one in the shape of their favorite Disney character.

I fell down this dessert wormhole when I started conceptualizing Cake Zine, a newly launched indie magazine exploring the historical, social, and personal context of desserts. My co-editor, Tanya Bush, is herself a baker who has found a rapt online audience happy to gaze at cakes they will likely never taste. But all of these highly Instagrammable desserts don’t just exist online. Each one is made for a real-life customer hoping to elevate a birthday, engagement party, or other occasion into something extraordinary. The online cake ecosystem is rich and growing, but from my experience, the full magic of these boundary-pushing confections can only happen offline, fork in hand.

“I think the feeling we all have coming out of lockdown has been really wanting to live to the fullest,” says Jenny Assaf, a vintage fashion seller living in New York City, who bought a pink matcha cake from Ginger May of Gigi’s Little Kitchen for her birthday last year. “People are dressing up more, going out more, and bringing people together more. These cakes are blossoming at a time when we want to celebrate.”

This year may be the biggest for weddings since 1984, though many people aren’t waiting for a diamond ring to go big on their cake occasions. “I had someone ask me to make a cake for when they were going to dump their girlfriend,” says May. “I didn’t do it since I didn't want to add to their horrific memory, but I’ve done a lot of proposals and birthdays recently.” After so many lockdown years of laid-back, single-serving desserts, she thinks people are craving the pomp and circumstance that comes with slicing into multiple layers of icing and sponge.

But online it’s easy to disassociate from their primal pleasure. Rendered in two dimensions and bathed in blue light, cakes exist digitally only as artful pieces of content for us to double-tap before swiping on. And this aesthetic-first recognition can make life hard for the baker. “I’ll get complete order forms that specify color and even flower shapes without a single mention of flavor,” says May. “Sometimes I'll genuinely be like, ‘Do people even eat these cakes?’ I see so many customer pictures and none of the cakes being sliced. ‘Is it just a prop at a party?’”

May’s abundantly decorated, flamboyant masterpieces have graced the Madison Square Garden greenrooms of pop icons like Dua Lipa and Billie Eillish, so perhaps it’s not surprising that her customers are looking for a similar social media moment. And there’s an inherent suspicion that highly decorative desserts might not measure up on the flavor front beneath all that cloying buttercream frosting. “Does it taste as good as it looks?” is a common refrain on cooking shows like The Great British Bake Off. But underneath those carpets of fractal frosting lies some of the best dairy-free cake I’ve tried, flavored with delicately bewitching fior di sicilia and punchy lemon.

“I love when people send me photos of the cakes being eaten or the cake board covered in crumbs,” agrees Jenneh Kaikai, who bakes under Pelah Kitchen. It’s an assurance that her creations are serving their truest purpose: consumption.

Flavor isn’t the only element of baking that’s hard to convey to digital fans. Most creators leading the online nouveau cake movement started it as a pandemic-era side project. Their followings and client wait lists are scaling up, but many still handle production in apartments, not professional kitchens. There are roommates fighting for fridge space, wonky ovens, and an eye-watering amount of dishes.

“If I’m making a five-tier wedding cake for 150 people, it’s a challenge when you can only bake from the central part of the oven,” says Amy Yip of Yip Studio. She began making custom cakes for purchase through Instagram about a year ago. And two months ago, Yip left her job as a textile designer to focus on baking full-time. Now, she makes ten to 15 bespoke cakes a week in her Brooklyn apartment, spending hours baking an oolong or Vietnamese ice coffee-flavored sponge before shaping and decorating it to look like a mossy knoll or granite slab. It’s unglamorous work, even if her resulting sculptural cakes are destined for chic clients like Marc Jacobs and, soon, the Noguchi Museum.

“I think because Instagram works like a highlight reel and people are getting a snapshot of what I'm doing, they don’t get my capacity. I’ll get huge orders with very little notice,” says Kaikai. “People don’t get that I'm actually at my apartment in my kitchen, so I can't make a cake for 55 people in two days.”

Online, cakes are beautiful forever. But in person, the reality of perishability creates a time limit that necessitates destruction, slice by slice. Michelle Rodriguez, an e-commerce manager, followed Pelah Kitchen for months before finally getting to try one of Kaikai’s cakes at her New York City courthouse wedding, thanks to a friend’s surprise. It was brown butter with pistachio frosting, decorated with a bouquet’s worth of flowers. “It was everything I could've imagined and more: The cake was perfectly sweet and her buttercream was magic,” says Rodriguez. “Needless to say, I froze half the cake and made sure we finished it right before our big move to Switzerland.” By then, the floral decorations were already long gone the way of garbage, but the transportive flavor remained for one last bite.

The closest I came to eating my Instagram feed was at When It’s Over, a one-day installation at the Brooklyn gallery IRL featuring sculptural cakes from Alli Gelles of Cakes4Sport. The whitebox space was lined with tall plinths bearing six cakes decorated with edible ink, gum paste, and meringue. Gelles’ work is intentionally messy and unexpected, as if the contents of a child’s dress-up box fell from the ceiling and became fossilized in frosting.

At first, viewing these highly Instagrammable cakes in person felt no different than through a phone screen; objects of admiration. But everything changed when one was sliced at the end of the evening, revealing olive oil sponge held together with loquat bayleaf jam and passion fruit pastry cream. “It felt really cathartic to see people eat this cake and to actually witness the end point,” says Gelles. “You must consume the work to fully experience it; the art is destroyed, leaving nothing behind.” After all, cake is made to be eaten.

The first issue of the author’s Cake Zine is available for preorder now.