50 Times People Came Up With The Most Ingenious Ways To Decorate A Cake

Regardless of what your favorite dessert is, it’s almost impossible not to like cake. There are endless possibilities with it, after all! You might want a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting or a lava cake paired with vanilla ice cream. You can make a pumpkin spice cake for fall and a lemon blueberry cake in the springtime. You’re obligated to eat cake on your birthday, so perhaps you’ll opt for a funfetti masterpiece. And during Mardi Gras, you can enjoy a classic king cake.

Personally, when I’m eating a dessert, the only factor I’m concerned about is the taste. We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, right? But nowadays, bakers have come up with incredible ways to up their cake game, one of which being coming up with incredible decorations. When I was a kid, the most impressive cakes I ever saw were those with photos printed on them or those with Barbie dolls in the middle where the cake made up her “dress.” One year, I even had a gorgeous, sparkly ruby slipper cake for my Wizard of Oz themed party. 

Today, however, bakers have turned cake decorating into an art. And the trend of hyper-realistic cakes has taken the internet by storm. If you’re familiar with the Netflix series Is it Cake?, you’ve seen this trend before. Cakes that look shockingly like plates of nachos, toilets or roller skates are only a few of the creations that have graced my television. 

But aside from the bakers featured on this show, there are plenty more creating content online and being hired every day to provide customers with amazing desserts that look like anything but cakes. According to Inverse, we can’t get enough of these hyper-realistic sweets because they confuse our brains. 

"I think we're fascinated by the quality of the illusion [of hyper-realistic cakes] — and there's the strange dissonance brought on by perceiving things in two ways," Rolf Nelson, professor of psychology at Wheaton College, told Inverse. He noted the famous example of the “rabbit-duck” illusion, which also captivates many people due to the fact that it can be seen in two ways. "In the cake example, we have a conflict of perceiving it as a face or as a cake. Because the face looks so realistic, it takes us a second to reconcile these two things," Nelson explained.