The Vintage Cake Trend and Nostalgic Excess
Until relatively recently, I hadn’t heard of this trend, but, lately, I can’t scroll through Instagram without seeing another wildly ornate, pastel-colored cake, sometimes in muted colors like sage green or dusty rose (my favorite), piped with dramatic ruffles, frilly borders and little messages. “Thanks for nothing!” or “Birthday Queen.” “In My Golden Era.” “Fuck, You’re Old.” Perhaps “Be Mine,” like a conversational heart. These cakes are predominantly heart-shaped to boot and they are having a serious moment.
The cakes don’t look modern, but they don’t quite look old either. They toe the line between today and some other time we can’t quite place. They are maximalists, these “vintage cakes,” as they are called. Draped in buttercream swags, piped shell border, rosettes, and often adorned with fabric ribbons, they are unapologetically romantic and nostalgic. Sometimes, I think, they are also just the right amount of ironic. And that’s probably why they have taken off in the way they have. They aren’t just all over social media, they are all over, period. You can find them in world-class bakeries like Peggy Porschen’s in London, Edda’s Cake Designs in Miami, and even in my pastry classes, where the chef instructor decided that everyone had to make a vintage cake because it was a good way to practice piping.
Although these cakes have a timeless look, they are largely inspired by cake decorating trends of the mid 20th century, and even as late the 1980s. When I first “discovered” cake decorating in the mid 2000s, cakes that resembled these vintage cakes were already considered old-fashioned and, consequently, out of fashion. When I paged through cake decorating manuals printed in the 1980s, I cringed at the final result while trying to learn the technique. I appreciated the skill that went into making the huge, ornate, architectural cakes of the period, I just didn’t want to make them. I was not alone. This was the time when fondant cakes, which gave a slicker, more modern look, really took off, at least in the United States, despite having been around for a long time.
The 1990s had their own influence on vintage cakes. Mostly in the color aesthetic. Not all vintage cakes are muted; some are quite bright and would have been right at home, colorwise, in a 1990s Taco Bell or Miami Subs Grill.
But those 20th century cakes that influenced the current vintage cake trend were in themselves a revival of a much older way of decorating cakes in the 19th century. Victorian wedding cakes were extremely detailed, with enormous amounts of piping work and sugar work. In the 1930s. Joseph Lambeth popularized a similar method of cake decorating called, unsurprisingly, the Lambeth Method. A core element of this method is overpiping, which as the name implies, involves multiple layers of icing piped on top of each other to create an intricate and ornate design. This style remained extremely popular until the 1950s before having its second most recent resurgence in the 1980s.
The vintage cake trend that we see today blends all of that cake history into something that feels new again. The main difference between historical Lambeth style and the Lambeth style of these vintage cakes is the medium. Lambeth-style cakes have traditionally been covered and piped entirely in royal icing, or, in the second half of the 20th century, also covered in fondant and then piped with royal icing. Royal icing isn’t flavorful, but it is much more stable than buttercream, what cake designers use currently to create the cakes. Royal icing is also piped in more delicate ways, whereas vintage style cakes are chonky, to borrow a Gen Z term. They are piped with large tips, leaving behind much more deliciously sweet buttercream. This is why they don’t quite look old, like your grandmother’s wedding cake. Why, despite the very old-fashioned techniques, they look modern and of the moment.
Aesthetically, vintage trend cakes are a mashup of eras and styles, but, culturally, they make sense right now. We are living in a moment when nostalgia is king. Gen Z and Millennials are turning to the past, and not because we want to live there. We just want to reinterpret it. And obviously that is what I do as a historian, but this is a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond those of us foolish enough to interpret the past professionally. Right now, whether it’s fashion, interior design, food, and much more, we are looking for something we can remix. Vintage cakes just happen to be an aspect of that. They are comforting and over the top; they are sincere and subversive, a little bit homemade, and a little bit fancy. Add glitter dust if you want to be extra. And of course you do.
The nostalgia factor can’t be ignored, and it makes sense that this trend started, well, trending upwards, during the COVID 19 pandemic. In an increasingly uncertain world that many, including myself, feel is falling apart, people are looking for comfort in the past. A past that, through the lens of right now, felt less catastrophic. While I’m normally weary of nostalgia in food, this feels different. It feels wholesome, if escapist.
Another reason I think that these cakes have taken off is because, compared to the very elaborate fondant cakes with intricate gum paste flowers, or the impossibly sculptural carved cakes that don’t look like food, they are relatively easy to make, not to mention fun. When more is more and mistakes are easily covered or made to look like part of the design, you can let the imagination, and your piping bag, run wild. This is an intricate yet accessible cake decorating method, made even more so by the slew of tutorials, reels, and how-tos that populate the internet and social media. What was once a niche skill is now trendy and easy to learn.
These cakes are also highly customizable. It’s almost like a choose-your-own-adventure endeavor. They can be any color, they can be romantic, sarcastic, funny, snarky. Some decorators are exploring more modern approaches to vintage cakes and are combining them with other aesthetics like kawaii, cottagecore, and fairycore. The possibilities are endless.
In the end, vintage cakes are less about eating dessert and more about emotion, about the comfort of harmless excess. They are a medium for storytelling, for rebellion, for joy. They are Instagrammable but unproblematic. And maybe that’s why they’ve stuck around longer than many food trends, and why the aesthetic keeps resurfacing over the decades in slightly different iterations. The world feels uncertain, complicated, hyper-digital, violent, and Millennials and Gen Zers have experienced more than our fair share of historic once-in-a-lifetime-events, and not the nice kind. And maybe, just maybe, an over the top, frilly, kitschy heart-shaped cake with the words “Don’t Cry” written on it is just what we didn’t know we needed.
And, as for me, I’ll take a little drama with my sugar rush any time.
Thank you for this—I’m still working on my piping skills so while vintage isn’t really
My aesthetic, it provides good, worthy practice.
Your own creation looks pretty darned impressive! Something I could never ever pull off.