Thanks largely to Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi, Clark’s hopes for a layer-cake renaissance eventually came true. As Melissa Clark opined in the New York Times in 1999, “Layer cake, an American icon, is in dire straits,” adding that “igh-end restaurants, where the layer cake once played such a proud role, have left it for dead, a casualty of the war among today’s dueling pastry chefs.” Meanwhile, many high-end chefs eschewed putting cake on their dessert menus, either because it was too pedestrian or too simple, instead opting for more outwardly complicated fare. Both ran in their original format for 10 seasons and have inspired an entire genre of shows about representational fondant cakes, including Ultimate Cake Off, Cake Wars, Nailed It!, and even, on at least one occasion, the Great British Bake Off. Three years later, TLC premiered Cake Boss, a similar concept starring Buddy Valastro. In 2006, Food Network debuted Ace of Cakes, a reality show in which baker Duff Goldman was challenged by clients to make increasingly deceptive cakes, which took the form of anything from cartoonish hamburgers to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The emergence of fondant as a popular decorating method in the ’80s allowed bakers the ability to make cakes that look like anything they wanted, a novelty that the public still can’t get enough of. “Wonderful cake artists creating these sculptural masterpieces that don’t look anything like cake.” By the ’70s, “cake was not cake anymore,” food historian Jessica Reed tells me as she walks me through the evolution of cake design. Lambeth-method cakes have remained popular for weddings, but the style of overpiping began falling out of fashion in the 1950s, with home bakers gravitating toward the ease of box mix. While such layer cakes might be a fairly modern invention, there’s a reason why they feel so vintage. In America, Lambeth popularized what’s known as “over-piping,” a centuries-old technique of overlapping lines to create intricate and layered dessert decorations. The lacey and abundant piping style we see today owes itself largely to Joseph Lambeth, the British expatriate and pastry chef whose book, Lambeth Method of Cake Decoration and Practical Pastries, was first published in 1934. Layer cakes as we know them, according to the Food Timeline, aren’t mentioned in cookbooks until the late 1800s, growing in popularity in tandem with the wedding cake. Marie-Antoine Carême, considered “the father of French cuisine,” is widely recognized for his pièces montées, masterful centerpieces created from ingredients like sugar paste and nougat, but he was only 9 when the French queen lost her head at the Place de la Révolution.
It’s a trend fueled by quarantine baking, but inspired by everything from the Instagram- and Pinterest-famous bakeries of South Korea to the video game Animal Crossing.Ī post shared by Hebe Konditori of the newly emerging group of dessert decorators rightfully cite 2006’s Marie Antoinette as visual inspiration, but, like much of the movie, anachronisms are at work.
As hobby baker Charlotte Zoller succinctly puts it, “Who among us millennials didn’t see Marie Antoinette and say, ‘Oh, I love cakes now’?”Įnough has been written about why cottagecore and its many aesthetic offshoots are having a moment, which allows us to jump past that and right into the buttery center that is our subject: the sudden ubiquity of flouncy and fussy layer cakes, an evolution of the cute-yet-furious activism and resistance cakes that followed former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. This highly curated tea party - wherein everyone is dressed in influencer-embraced Selkie puff or Lirika Matoshi strawberry dresses, their makeup laborious in the service of looking naturally rosy from the outdoors, and glowing like the wearer always happens to be sitting in a sunbeam - happens to be catered only with the prettiest of desserts, all of which look like they sprang directly from a Sofia Coppola film.
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