Let Them Bake “Ugly” Cake

A response to The Cut’s takedown of contemporary cake culture

Dear Cake Friends,

Last week, our texts blew up: Have you read The Cut’s ugly cake article? We hadn’t. But as the editors of a publication with cake in the name, we felt professionally obligated to check out the discourse. We clicked. We cringed.

In “Enough With the Ugly Cakes”, writer Bindu Bansinath opens with a complaint that she feels obligated to spend $200+ on a bespoke cake for a friend’s birthday party. It quickly devolves into a sneering takedown of the vast ecosystem of contemporary cakes shared on Instagram and eaten IRL.

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?

What does an ugly cake even look like? It’s hard to say, because Bansinath has a laundry list of aesthetic grievances: glitter-dusted maraschino cherries, inedible flowers, Lambeth piping (intricate textures of piped icing first popularized in the 1930s), chaotic colorways, “shapeless mounds.” Needless to say, none of these cakes look remotely similar. So what exactly is the offense here? Complexity? Effort? After so many years of rustic “naked cakes” that lack any sense of personality beyond a vaguely boho Pinterest board, does any kind of intentional aesthetic read as cringe? No matter the reason, it’s disappointing to use a platform as large as The Cut’s to reduce an entire class of bakers' work as “ugly” when taste, in every sense of the word, is subjective.

What we found particularly frustrating about the piece is not that the author expresses a subjective opinion instead of simply going to the nearest grocery store and buying a $30 sheet cake. It's that the article uses images of these independent bakers’ cakes, and then hyperlinks specific criticism directly to the baker’s pages. No outreach. No quotes. We can’t see the point in hyperlinking directly to the bakers whose work you are publicly ridiculing (except to send snarky readers to their pages to laugh along).

We launched Cake Zine with a focus on cake because of its cultural richness. Cake reflects a moment in time: the aesthetics in vogue, the economic conditions that shape what ingredients are prized or even just available. The artists driving this most recent evolution in cake are largely independent, self-taught, and incredibly driven—and through the magazine, we have been lucky to sample their (non-ugly, non-dry) cakes and see the hard work that goes into them.

Nobody made us the defenders of cakes, or cake bakers. But after seeing familiar names in these hyperlinks, we reached out to some of the bakers to hear their response:

Lulu Prat of Bodega Cakes: “Of course not every style resonates with everyone—that’s the nature of creative work. What I did find disappointing was seeing an entire space—one made up almost exclusively of small, femme-owned businesses—reduced so casually.”

Lucie Franc de Ferriere of From Lucie: “What bothered me most about the article was how little research went into writing it. It read less like journalism and more like someone woke up, saw one too many cakes on their feed, and decided to take down women who are working long hours, doing their best to be creative and personal in an incredibly tough industry.”

Madeline Bach of Frosted Hag: “I support criticism when it’s intellectually honest, well-researched, and offered in good faith—not when it’s lazy provocation disguised as commentary, especially when it comes at the expense of hardworking small businesses…rent is high, margins are low, and people expect a lot. So to casually diminish the work of cake makers, based purely on photos or price tags, without context or nuance is not only unfair, it’s irresponsible.”

Bespoke cakes have always commanded a higher price tag considering the labor, materials, expertise and time cost, especially in cities like New York where margins are razor-thin. For Madeline, a $330 cake serving 7-10 people takes at least 10 hours to produce. “If you were to even modestly value that time at $20/hour, that’s $200 in labor alone…It’s a super thin margin, especially for something that’s a commissioned art piece made entirely by hand. I can’t order everything in bulk/wholesale, and I didn’t have health insurance until last month,” she says. Ironically, the writer comes tantalizingly close to realizing the expertise that justifies the cost when she closes the piece by chronicling her attempts to make a tiramisu for the party, needing to make it a second time when the filling is a failure.

There is one gripe in the piece that we agree with: That cakes are often used as a centerpiece at media events without being eaten. The great pleasure of showcasing cake as art is that it is designed to be devoured. However, we’d place the blame on event organizers, not the bakers themselves. Nobody wants to be the first person to carve into a cake, particularly in front of a crowd. The solution is simple: Provide capable staff on-hand to slice and serve cake. Whole cakes are a signature display element at many Cake Zine events, but they are always completely consumed, because our team slices and distributes the cake (after leaving enough time for photos to be taken). It’s a dramatic crux of the night and sometimes terrifying to witness the cake-crazed hunger, but not a single slice is left behind.

The rise of different cake styles is a boon, not a bust—it invites personal expression, and allows non-professionals to feel like they can participate in an art form that historically has been all about precision. So what if your cake cracks in the oven? Whip up some technicolor frosting—or, gasp! a glitter-dusted maraschino cherry!—and take pleasure in the process of making something. Don’t worry if your piping is uneven; that’s not the point.

What’s actually going on here isn’t about cake. It’s about rage bait journalism, hot takes for their own sake, and the narrow-minded blindness of a particular media class trying to extrapolate a trend into clicks before big tech sucks the last gasp of ad revenue from the internet. After so many years of trend pieces celebrating the rise of “non-conformist,” “chaotic,” and “wacky” cakes, maybe it was inevitable that someone would try a take down.

As Madeline wrote to us, “I’d urge The Cut to reflect on what kind of creative community they claim to support—and whether this kind of coverage reflects their values. The article doesn’t just miss the point; it weaponizes ignorance for clicks, at the expense of people whose labor they depend on to fill their pages with content.”

We agree. Many of the bakers targeted in this story create dessert for events that are breathlessly covered in the very same publication. Some have even been interviewed about their work! Especially considering The Cut’s purported mission of being “dedicated to women's lives and interests,” vaguely dismissing an array of women-owned businesses because you feel personally burdened by a self-inflicted expectation to emulate or patronize their work just comes across as punching down. Conflating personal frustration with cultural critique is not journalism. It’s projection iced as commentary.

— Aliza and Tanya

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Submit: Words In Urdu is launching their first zine on “South Asian food, language, and memory,” and inviting South Asian chefs, artists, writers, and designers to submit work. Submissions are open until August 10. More details here.

Read: Daily Bread contributor Daniel Saldaña París has a novel newly translated into English, The Dance and the Fire, releasing at the end of the month.

Bake: Kaitlyn Wong’s ricotta lemon poppyseed doughnuts with a strawberry glaze.