Our ravenous appetite for cake content arises from our collective search for meaning in the mundane. The use of cake as a medium for art and storytelling is the best way to illustrate our perpetually morphing cultural obsession.
By Ella Sosik
On a warm night in late April of this year, a cake-themed party was in full swing at the Bushwick mainstay Honey's to celebrate the inaugural issue of Cake Zine. This gathering of cake fanatics was complete with a table of flamboyantly decorated cakes in unconventional flavors (donated by various internet-famous NYC home bakers), the walls of the dance floor lit by gaudy projections of wobbling jelly molds. An impromptu tattoo station by artist Anna Williams offered various “sexy cake” flash tattoos, on theme with the zine that inspired this event. This zine project, which is a collaboration between home baker and content creator Tanya Bush and freelance writer and editor Aliza Abarbanel, is an exemplary case study on the phenomenon of our culture's obsession with attaching meaning to cake.
Although cake’s symbolism has shifted over centuries, humanity's love for writing about and making art about cake has been consistent. The 'Cake Hole' column on Vice by Bettina Makalintal is a contemporary example of cake as a conduit for larger, theoretical explorations. In one of her pieces, Makalintal shows how investigating the origin story behind a viral image of a sheet cake floating in the ocean can be a route to exploring the truest essence of eerie liminal memes while also tying the resurgence of jelly cake and aspic to the resurrection of campy aesthetics and questionable taste.
Other foods aren't critically probed quite in the way that cake is, making the place it occupies in culture special. One possible reason for this is its indubitable role in celebratory and ritualistic functions, managing to elevate the mundane just by being present. The aesthetic aspects of cake often outweigh the actual taste of it. Unlike most foods, cake is seen as superfluous; the final bite, insignificant, an addition. Visual artist Will Cotton, who is most well known for painting a nude Katy Perry into one of his signature cotton candy clouds on her iconic Teenage Dream album art, feels that the allure of confections has a narcotic quality. Cotton says, "sweets are an indulgence we have all experienced, and like drugs, they exist only for pleasure."
Dessert is often treated as an afterthought, and many influential chefs have been vocal about the fact that they do not take it seriously, nor find it fundamentally necessary. Anthony Bourdain famously cared so little for sweets that he replaced the typically obligatory dessert section in his cookbook with a snide passage denouncing them, paired with recommendations for a cheese course. This lack of inherent gastronomic significance allows cake a certain neutrality that makes it the perfect canvas to be embedded with meaning. Which begs the question: Why is cake a persistent focus of serious think pieces and artworks that aim to use the food as a lens to reflect higher meaning, when it has traditionally been regarded as a symbol of frivolity?
Cake's connotations have not been static throughout history, but our modern rituals are derivative of more ancient ceremonies. In fact, the first cakes were more bread-like. The frosted, stacked, and sugar-decorated modern cakes we're familiar with today were popularized only at the turn of the 19th century when Carême revolutionized and elevated the art of pastry. Of all the meanings that are thrust upon cake, associations with sexuality seem to be the oldest and most deeply rooted of all. Historically, a myriad of early civilizations associated cake strongly with fertility. It's possible that these associations have stuck around, trickling down to become the modern spectacle that is the 'gender reveal' celebration.
The Mardi Gras practice of embedding a tiny plastic baby into the king cake also represents cake's association with fertility and religion. This ritual is meant to represent the arrival of the three wise men in Bethlehem with their offerings to baby Jesus, but the roots of the annual New Orleans tradition actually predate the spread of Christianity across Europe. Scholars speculate that the origins of the king cake's plastic baby can be traced back to the Romans’ annual Saturnalia festival, during which they honored the agricultural god Saturn by placing a single fava bean inside their cakes.
In the modern day, cake is influenced by the media and media is influenced by cake. Trends in cake decoration have proliferated over the past few decades, and cakes featured in media have accelerated the development of these trends. When director Sofia Coppola chose to adorn the film Marie Antoinette (2006) with the highly stylized desserts of famed Parisian pastry shop Ladurée in part to craft a metaphor for Marie's naive girlishness and frivolity, she also offhandedly sparked a renaissance of rococo patisserie (at least on the internet). The iconic supercut of opulent cakes being consumed with abandon by Antoinette and her court sets the film apart from other drab period films by a mile and has inspired countless cake bakers who hoped to recreate the energy of this bubbly revelry.
Other cakes in films have been similarly influential in the baking world, creating an interesting cultural feedback loop between bakers and media. Cakes in Cinema on Instagram is an account dedicated to documenting sightings of cake in movies. Consequentially, social media has put cake in front of more people's eyes than ever, as creators have the ability to share their unconventional cakes with a huge audience, inspiring more people to bake and be more innovative with their designs. The algorithm seems to favor these images, indicating that people have a strong desire to consume these photos over and over again.
Lately, the cake trend cycle has been leaning towards eccentricity. Bakers everywhere are coveting the absurd, embracing the look of freakishly toxic-looking neon colors, buttercream carefully applied to look intentionally sloppy or even melted, and cakes built lopsided to appear as though they're on the verge of toppling over. Bizarre cakes have become so popular that they've established themselves as a genre in their own right, and social media followers (as well as food writers) can't seem to get enough of the esoteric desserts. The self-perpetuating creative space that is "cake Instagram'' is generating endless articles analyzing what sparked this abandonment of conventions. Is it pandemic-induced fatigue that changed the rules of cake decoration? Or are pastry chefs simply rebelling by detaching themselves from the expectations of the strict rules and conventions of classical cake?
One particularly striking cake trend article consulted with Madrid art critic Fernando Castro for his (admittedly rather cerebral) opinion on the phenomenon, which he dubbed “post-Wabi-Sabi pastry” in reference to "the delirious optimism of certain neoliberal gurus and the Japanese aesthetic that values the beauty of imperfection." Regardless of irony, the aesthetic seems to reflect the larger cultural "vibe shift," or perhaps it is creating its own within the realm of food. The deliberate departure from technical precision in favor of chaos and naturalness reflects the current state of the world, as well as any contemporary art, could hope to.
Cake by Billie Belo Cake by Ali Gelles
The blurry line between food and art is almost as convoluted as these cakes. The neverending debate over when food qualifies as art is especially interesting when we consider cake, which can function equally as the medium and the muse for artists. Cake can even be used to create subversive and controversial art. Critics of artist Emma Heimark's minutely detailed cake sculpture recreations of disaster scenes like Chernobyl and the Oklahoma Bombing assert that her work is in poor taste. Heimark, who creates under the name Edible Freaks, disagrees, "We eat the beast. It’s an act of mutual destruction, much like the disasters themselves.” Her tendency to offend seems to be based less on her recreating tragic scenes of catastrophe, and more on the fact that she is using cake as the material for creation. The controversy of this use of cake hints at the ambiguous social rules that dictate when cake is appropriate and when it is not.
Cake is both the medium and the muse for many visual artists, some of whom have been so continuously inspired by cake that they have based whole portions of their career around it. American painter Wayne Thiebaud's simple, vibrant slices of cakes and pie may be the most famous of all. Basic in their design, Thiebaud's cakes are known amongst critics and fans for commenting on subjects such as consumerism and isolation while capturing the feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that tie cake images into the canon of Americana. A feature by art writer Ed Schad calls Thiebaud "one of the most significant painters of the postwar American dream."
Artist Dana Sherwood's work is often centered around confections as well, although with quite a different angle; she uses cake to explore contact between humans and other animals. In many of her pieces, she sets out to capture the primality of indulgence by arranging decadent feasts of fancifully decorated cakes and sculptured gelatin molds for wild animals and recording their consumption of them. The footage of the cakes as they inevitably decay and return to the environment serves as an examination of our relationship to nature in the Anthropocene.
Encased Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud Feral Cakes Project by Dana Sherwood, 2017
Building on cake's fertility connotations, new parallels of pleasure have been drawn as modern cakes have taken on a more decadent form. New York-based artists Will Cotton and Julia Jaquette both deal with themes of desire. Cotton's candy landscapes and portraits of coquettish young women adorned with sweets-themed costumes (cupcake-tin dresses, ornate icing piping as attire, macaron accessories) deal with concepts such as the insatiability of desire and how advertising cycles can incite these appetites within us. Cotton admits that he started painting candy and cakes as a metaphor for his own willful hedonism and substance abuse, although you would never know it by looking at the chocolate rivers and candy cane forests that define his work.
Jaquette's style is much more overt. Her 'food' collection from the late 90s uses simple iconographic food images to convey feelings of human desire—the convergence of longings. The paintings ask the viewer to imagine acts of consumption. They are about wanting; the images are contextualized only through their juxtaposition with text where the craving for food is compellingly correlated with romantic longing.
Featured in one of the pieces in Cake Zine's 'Sexy Cake' issue is sex worker and cake-sitter Lindsay Dye, who sat on her last cake with appropriate revelry at a party in the Meatpacking district earlier this year. Cake-sitting, a form of sexual fetish that is exactly what it sounds like, emphasizes the connection between cake and eroticism to an extreme. Dye, who became known in part for incorporating singing into her act (usually melancholy love ballads), says that although people often come to her performances expecting an explicitly sexual experience, they are often emotionally moved. She says, "My greatest performances were when there were people in the audience crying.” There are as many layers to Lindsay's work as there are to the multi-tier cakes she designs and bakes herself, but the message of cake's innate ties to intimacy and emotion comes through clearly.
Author of Cake: A Global History, Nicola Humble describes cake as "one of those foodstuffs whose symbolic function can completely overwhelm its actual status as comestible, although it is also emphatically and often excessively sensual, smeared with icing and disgorging creamy fillings: "food layered on food." It goes without saying that many foods are culturally significant, but cake is set apart by the fact that symbolism can, and often does, overwhelm its actual function as consumable. As the cake field continues to spawn new trends at an exponential rate, the cultural meaning of cake is guaranteed to take on new forms in the future. The only question is what will be next for this food that is embedded in our deepest intimate feelings, most celebratory moments, and oldest memories. It's hard to imagine our culture losing its appetite for cake—we seem to be insatiable.
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Ella Sosik is in her third semester of the Food Studies graduate program and is a co-editor for Bite. She is from New England and previously studied baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America. Her passions within food include exploring gastronomy through the arts and creating sustainable and equitable food systems for the future.
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