A few weeks ago, my friend and I hosted a shared birthday party for 20-ish guests at her apartment. We batched spritzes and bought fried-eggplant pizzas, and I volunteered to get us a cake. A simple enough task, but cakes these days, or at least the bespoke ones that feel chic enough to present to a roomful of partygoers, are anything but simple. A single six-inch tier that you can order by color or “vibe” pushes $200. A ten-inch sponge cake with a few flowers and berries sticking out of it costs more than $300. The prices made my eyes water. But after a while, so did the cakes themselves. Could it be that all of it — the neon colors, ornate florals, and frenetic icing — was in fact ugly beyond measure?
Ugly Cakes, as I’ve started calling them, tend to fall into two categories. First, you have vintage monstrosities, overly frosted throwbacks that usually come in circular tiers or heart shapes, studded with frilly bows and glitter-dusted maraschino cherries no one really eats. They’re covered all over with thick, Lambeth piping, a 1930s decorating style characterized by intentional excess to create layers and dimension. The second type, floral slop, look more avant-garde. These shapeless mounds are slathered with icing and rammed with bits of inedible flora, as if excavated off the forest floor and into a niche online bakery. The future isn’t always progress.
The maximalist trend first took off during the pandemic, when everyone had lots of time on their hands and very little to celebrate and Instagram was one of our last lifelines to human connection. Laid-off and underemployed bakers started making outlandish and whimsical designs that quickly took off. The first few times these cakes popped up on my feed, they were cute and novel. One million scrolls through my For You Page later, they’ve started to seem gaudy, boring, and somewhat infantilizing, the edible equivalent of stuffing Miss Havisham’s veil down your throat whether you’re turning 15, 22, or “MILFing it” into your 30s. Instagram face has officially come for the dessert table.
From normies to celebrities, no one is immune to the Ugly Cake. Keke Palmer celebrated her 30th earlier this year with a garish pink-and-purple heart. Long-stemmed blooms hung limp from one of Gloria Steinem’s cakes at her 91st birthday party in March. In April, Gigi Hadid rang in her 30th with a giant, star-spangled, burgundy number meant to evoke “Western chic with an edge.” At the London premiere of Lena Dunham’s new Netflix show Too Much, three Barbie-pink Lambeth cakes were plonked alongside heart-shaped macarons.
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I’m not saying these cakes don’t require skill, artistry, and impressive amounts of labor to create. But beneath all the branches and glitter, they’re often just not that good. (It makes sense: They’re made to be seen or even stabbed on SNL; taste is low on the priority list). The handful of times I’ve come across these cakes at events, they’re surrounded by trays of less aesthetically pleasing desserts for guests to actually eat. And when I’ve actually eaten them, I’ve first had to scrape off gobs of cloyingly sweet icing. Meanwhile, the layers themselves are oddly undericed, not to mention dry. For all the fussiness of flavors like sesame grape and prosecco-basil buttercream, everything tastes suspiciously like boxed vanilla.
If you’ve had a slice of genuinely delicious Ugly Cake, I’m happy for you! But I’ve had enough. Give me a big honking square of grocery-store sheet cake from a Stop & Shop fridge. Whatever happened to the unassuming torte, the trusty cheesecake, the good old bundt? My friend and I ended up making our own from scratch. Her husband baked a delicious custard-filled almond cake with toasted almonds up and down the sides while I whipped egg yolks and sugar for a tiramisu. The first time, I messed up the filling. The second, I dusted too much cocoa powder over the top, so that when we lifted the foil to serve our guests, patches of the surface appeared strangely wet. It was embarrassing to present something less than perfect to the people in the room, all of whom have certainly scrolled past visual perfection before. Still, a magical thing happens when you bring an ordinary, palatable dessert to a party. It gets eaten so quickly there’s almost no time to photograph the evidence.
