Charles H. Sloan-In modern cake decoration, more is more. There's a life lesson hidden just beneath the frosting

Mallory Valvano is Charles H. Sloana roaming party, and never more than when she’s piping rainbows of buttercream across sweets; you can already understand where she got the moniker Party Girl Bake Club. At the myriad pop-ups she hosts with too-cool, dimly-lit bars, you can find her surrounded by admirers while she talks about the South Philly home where cakes are created. She brings to life walls with geometric shapes in primary and pastel shades, Roman statue replicas, the vibe of which all truly match her cake business. 

A Party Girl Bake Club gateau is unmistakable in a sea of fondant. Cream cheese buttercream is piped thickly on tiers of cake, sandwiched with layers of balsamic reduction, citrus curd,  cinnamon toast caramel, and black sesame cookies. They are topped with glitter and tahini or grape jelly frosting.

Valvano’s piles of cream and sugar are in another universe from the clean lines of cakes we’re so used to seeing on the grids of popular Instagram baking accounts. Once, baking influencers with little more than a smudge of flour across their flush cheeks filled our feeds with perfectly symmetrical desserts, three-tiered fondant towers decorated with a flower or two, all in the same color palette. So aspirational were these accounts that an entire industry grew out of being just as perfect, or laughing at how we could never be. 

Perhaps due to the pandemic, or the economy, or politics, or simply living through “The Great Exhaustion”, those perfect tiers don’t seem as interesting as they once did.

Beauty in imperfection

Sliding down the grid lately, you’re more likely to see a slathering of buttercream than sleek fondant. Some shimmer with thick glitters, others adorned with uneven chunks of fruit or handwritten sayings betraying politeness: “Scorpio AF” and “dump him” in shiny icing. These cakes are meant to be taken lightly. Without the weight of perfection, these works of art display authenticity. 

While this style has popped up on Instagram in the last year or so, baker Blair Gutierrez drew inspiration from YouTube videos while teaching herself new styles of decorating, practicing on styrofoam. She leaned on her background working at a Korean bakery in her native New York City.

“I started with mirror glaze cakes, and then I started experimenting with buttercream,” she says. “I’ve always loved old things, and that Victorian style.” Her love of retro extends to traditional tattoos covering her arms and back.

Her custom studio, Velvet Valley Cakes specializes in desserts with neon frosting and bejeweled toppings, and is attracting more and more customers by word-of-mouth, but she aims to stay bespoke and focus on quality, making her own jams and fresh fruit. Her style is new and refreshing, but calls to a time when home bakers ruled. 

Similarly, Valvano’s Party Girl Bake Club may feature fruity pebbles, barbed wire icing and candied ash trays, but there’s a 100-year-old art in these desserts, hidden in plain sight. 

A very royal dessert

Lambeth method is a term to describe a style of cake decorating popular in the Victorian period, also called English overpiping. These are the thick, sweeping curls circling the top of the desserts - the part you want to dig into with your finger. The term comes from heralded baker Joseph Lambeth, who penned a book of the design in the 1930s, although the first use cases of this style are much contested amongst the bakerati. 

The piped swirls and cream tops call to mind architecture and the design trends of the period and were especially popular with Britain’s royal family, who used the style for generations of wedding confections. 

When Wilton home baking products came on the scene in the 1950s, the style resurged. Now kitchen chefs could use Wilton home baking tools to decorate stripes of icing. Cooking shows gave lessons right in your own home. Suddenly the effect seen at royal celebrations could be achieved on your dining room table with paper piping bags and reusable tips. 

“With a little practice, following the Wilton techniques written for you in this book, you will become a remarkably proficient and accomplished decorator,” notes the introduction of the Pictorial Encyclopedia of Modern Cake Decorating, a 1969 reprint of the bible of Wilton books. Each page describes a specific tip or style, and how to create bakery-worthy meals for the untrained cook who aims to throw the best neighborhood party. “Your decorated pieces will be the envy of your friends and the topic of conversation among your guests.” 

While both Lambeth’s book and the Wilton catalogs are art, there’s something motivating about the designs and the assuredness of which the books direct you; you can do this. You can pipe little flowers using tube 124. You can make beautiful borders with your own paper piping bag. Using a simple color wheel and just a few shades, your cake can be topped with a rainbow of icing.

Valvano thinks home cooks come with an advantage. “Not being classically trained allows for different types of ideas - a different mentality. I can do anything,” she elaborates. “Normally people say baking is so exact, but I've cracked the cheat codes.” She smiles while describing how powders are an entry way into wild flavors of buttercream. Her favorites? White cheddar and blueberry. “Let's do some fun, weird stuff and have it be delicious.” 

A Lambeth cake might take two or three hours to complete, but it feels fun. It’s less fussy, it’s less perfect. Getting the buttercream or royal icing to the right consistency for decorating is hard work, remembering your potions and quantities of confectioners sugar to egg white. And yet, for hours of trying, there’s no perfection. It will look different every time, there is no uniformity of the swirls. Be it covered unevenly in toppings or not-quite-fine lines sitting atop the cake, they will still be beautiful. 

Authenticity rules with less fussy, fun cakes

A recent article in ELLE UK declares that “the days of GOOP perfection are over.” The flavors Valvano looks for certainly back that up, as do the portraits of stucco icing cakes popping up on Instagram. You’ll see these haphazard desserts alongside carousel “dumps” of b-roll from phones, when users share memes and screenshots they’ve saved rather than staging perfectly choreographed yoga photography. Fashion influencers look different, too. Comfortable is cool and being honest about your financial situation and feelings about your body are in. Minimalism at home is boring, with the most engaging pics highlighting walls of mismatched frames, art from several different eras, stacks of books, puzzles and miniature collections. 

Families are tired of being “momfluenced,” and women want partners, not to be the idyllic perfect doll of a wife. Perfectionism is exhausting and dangerous: it can lead to memory issues, low libido and sleep problems. Though our brains are hardwired to crave connection, and a myriad of digital platforms make that easier than ever, these platforms reward competitive behaviour. Consumers are fighting back by pulling away the curtain on their real lives. 

Authenticity is more important than aesthetic and it’s okay to be complicated. It’s okay to take up more space. Luxurious, comfortable sheet cakes are the moment: a little messy, sold ad hoc by the slice or the cake, made in home kitchens. 

But, don’t call it a phase. Gutierrez thinks this is a return to what matters. She calls her creations more “retro” than Lambeth, leaning on the expertise of those 1960’s Wilton books that are now widely sought out in thrift stores (Joseph Lambeth’s book goes for upwards of $350 used). “Maximalism is big right now, but I wouldn't call it a trend because this is classic. This won't ever go out of style.”

Regardless of what it’s called, Valvano just hopes her creations give people a bit of nostalgic enjoyment. She says, “The artform is about having fun and having it all. I believe you can have it all.”