Social media is responsible from some of the most outré trends of our time, from scrunchies, to slime, to Stanley cups (seriously, if some enterprising young member of Gen Z can explain the visceral appeal of that last one to my elderly millennial ass, I’ll be forever grateful). But a significantly more flamboyant—and distinctly flammable—new capital-T thing has come along to displace them all: the ridiculously candle-filled birthday cake.
Cast your mind back to Joe Biden’s 81st birthday last fall. Believe it or not, that atomic fireball on the table in front of Biden is actually a cake. Of course, it also gave eagle-eyed social media viewers the opportunity to crack wise:
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Weirdly for a man who is—as his many birthday candles clearly indicate—81 years old, Biden is right on trend with Gen Z (cake-wise, if not approval-ratings-wise). Bettina Makalintal recently reported about the pervasive new TikTok trend of burn-away cakes, which are (just as they sound) cakes made up of layers that disappear engulfed in flames. Makalintal attributes the current popularity of the trend to bakers Namaya Navaratnarajah and Denise Steward, and goes into the science behind it, which involves frosting sheets, wafer paper, and perhaps just a touch of latent pyromania. TikTokers are making their own approximations with aplomb, and TBH, it’s mesmerizing to watch.
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Not to be outdone, Marc Jacobs gave us a new chapter in the cake-on-fire genre this week with an Instagram video of himself blowing out the candles on an absolutely flame-drenched sheet cake (and attempting to protect his bag from the blaze). Now that an A-lister has embraced the trend, it’s pretty objectively fashionable, right? Secure that bag, Marc!
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I’m still working on mastering non-flaming cakes (and I maintain that anyone who just has the necessary baking ingredients on hand is deeply suspicious—how do you always have eggs?) But this TikTok trend has me considering the possibility of baking a burn-away pastry of my own for Valentine’s Day—something like an extremely online answer to baked Alaska. The messy-cake trend was a better fit for my baking skill level, but I’m still down to give it a try, provided I can get my hands on some safety goggles and batteries for my smoke detector.
