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?’”