This article was originally published on Mako
One of the coolest things about the modern age is that it's more accessible for people to pursue what they love than ever before. Not long ago, a town might have had one or two bakers, maybe a few more if you lived in a big city, and their works would only be seen by a few. But thanks to the internet, both professional and home bakers from around the globe are able to show off their creations to thousands of people. Scroll on for some serious eye candy.
Sip Sip Hooray
This giraffe knows that coffee is the most important thing in life, or at least the artist who painted him does. She's a Belarussian baker with a ton of talent for creating colorful and detailed cakes that often feature adorable animals. To create this cake, she handpainted the giraffe with some food coloring on a base of white buttercream, making sure to shape his lips as if they were wrapped around a straw.
The coffee cup itself is made of white chocolate, melted and re-hardened in a cup-shaped mold and then placed next to the cake with a white chocolate "lid" and "straw"
An Out-Of-This-World Cake
Elena Gnut is a Russian baker with a real flair for creating highly detailed and at times rather creepy confections. Some of her pieces are so lifelike that it's hard to believe they're even edible. This solar system cake is actually one of her simpler creations, but that doesn't mean it's not super impressive. To make it, she cut pieces of cake into spheres of different sizes and mounted them on rods and wires.
Every part of the cake is covered in chocolate, including the gold rings circling around the planets. She then hand-painted each piece with food dyes to make them look like planets.
Spidey Sense
When we were kids, having a Spiderman cake meant buying some generic, rectangular grocery store cake with a picture printed on it in that weird sugar paper. You know, the same one all the other kids had at their birthdays? Bakers have gotten quite creative since then, and this work of art by Elena from Your Happy Cake really takes the concept of a superhero cake to a whole new level.
She decided to put a picture of Spidey on the side of the cake and created a hand out of fondant to make it appear as if he's climbing up a wall.
Don't Burst His Bubble
Featuring everyone's favorite little blue Experiment 626, this Stitch cake would be perfect for any Disney-lover's birthday. It's another example of creative pastry making that includes a character who appears to actually pop out of a cake rather than an image simply printed on top. Stitch's face and body are painted flat onto the side, while his ears and feet are made out of frosting to create a 3D effect.
The added pink bubble gum bubbles add an adorable and festive touch as well as a little "pop" of color against the white and blue watercolor design in the background.
Taco Time
Who needs Pretty Patties when you've got these tasty tacos? Macarons are a type of cookie made from almond flour and meringue, and they're often colored with different food dyes so that they happen to resemble Spongebob's famous colorful hamburgers, but Tess from Fluff Cups decided to make a batch of the cookies inspired by tacos instead. She made the cookies long rather than round so that they'd resemble taco shells.
Chocolate cream in the middle acts as the "ground beef" while red, green, and yellow sprinkles look like salsa, lettuce, and cheese on top. They'd be a great dessert after a Mexican meal!
Cake, Served.
We didn't even really believe that this was a cake at first - it looks more like a sculpture made out of tennis balls glued together, but we checked and it turns out that Lera from Le Eklera really is just that good of a baker. She wrote that creating this cake was quite time-consuming, and we can understand why. The finished product supposedly weighs over five and a half pounds!
How many tennis balls do you think there are in total? It's hard to tell from this picture, but Lera revealed that the cake is made up of 93 balls!
Splash!
How cool is this splash cake by Larissa from Bakey Bakes? She's a Portuguese baker with a shop in Atlanta where she makes some of the most beautiful floral and nature-inspired cakes you'll ever see. This cake, with its gorgeous Bordeaux-colored frosting and gold accent splashes, reminds us of a glass of grape juice or red wine - the perfect dessert to offer at the end of any dinner party.
The splash effect on top was created using isomalt, a sugar substitute that doesn't caramelize the way regular sugar does, which allows it to be manipulated into almost any shape.
Tree of Love
This cake was inspired by 100-year-old banyan trees at an estate in South Florida called The Addison. It's an absolutely gorgeous wedding venue, so it's only fitting that its trees were used as inspiration to create what would make a beautiful wedding cake. Seven white tiers in varying sizes are stacked to create a classic, simple backdrop perfect for showcasing all of the detailed twists and turns of the fondant tree.
After all, what else could represent love as well as something that lives so long? Wedding cakes are most often decorated with flowers, but we think this is a much better option.
A Journey Through Iceland
Another one from the super talented Lera from Le Eklera, this really doesn't even look like a cake. It seems more like some kind of cool sculpture or even a fountain. You can believe it though - she carved the cake itself into the shape of the body of the mug and then used modeling chocolate and food dyes to create the rest of the scene, which was inspired by a trip to Iceland.
Our favorite part is the rain falling from the cloud. Little wires are used to hold the cloud up, but the raindrops are actually made out of isomalt, a type of sugar substitute.
Ocean Blue
The technique used to decorate this cake is known as a mirror glaze, where gelatin and water-based icing made with cream and sugar is poured over the cake. The traditional frosting is made with butter and powdered sugar, which gives it a thick and spreadable texture, but mirror glazes have a liquid consistency. The gelatin is what gives the glaze its mirror-like shine, and using multiple colors can create a marble effect.
Marine from Les Patisseries de Mama ('Mama's Pastries', in English) used a combination of teal blue and white glazes to decorate this cake so that it would resemble crashing ocean waves.
The Sweetest Bear
The cutest little confection we ever did see. This bear cake may look fairly simple compared to some of the other cakes we've shared, but don't be fooled - piping dozens of buttercream flowers so neatly is no easy feat. Darlene from Make Fabulous Cakes used a special kind of frosting called Korean buttercream to give the roses a glossy sheen. We love that she gave the bear its own little cupcake!
This cake would make a great option for a child's birthday; it'd be really fun to get creative with it! Different colors of icing could be used to make a panda or polar bear.
A Well-Dressed Cake
The name is Bond, Cake Bond. This New Year's Eve cake has the right idea- it's classy yet simple in a way that says "I want to be formal, but I'm here to party." Janderyn Makris from Earth and Sugar bakery created it for New Year's Eve 2021 by first coating the cake with a clean white buttercream and then adding tuxedo pieces made out of black, white and gold fondant.
This is definitely an idea for a cake we haven't seen anywhere else before. It could also be really fun to serve as a second "groom's cake" at a wedding.
Pie of the Tiger
This cherry pomegranate pie is made to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger is so gorgeous, we'd be hesitant to even cut into it. Not your average baker, the creator makes pie art by cutting pieces of dough into different shapes and using them to design a completed image. She then uses food dyes mixed with a little vanilla extract to color in some of the pieces before baking.
We love the way the flowers resemble cherry blossoms, it's fitting given the ingredients in the pie. The red color of the fruit is the perfect background for all of those little crust pieces.
Deceptive Desserts
We had macaron tacos, now may we present macaron sushi! The trend of bakers creating treats that resemble other foods is quite popular, but this is definitely one take we've never seen before. Kimber Lee from Creme Macarons dyed her cookie batter using what she calls the "concentric circle technique" in black, white, and green before baking. From above, the black looks like seaweed, the white like rice, and the green like avocado.
She added some white sprinkles to make the white part look more like rice and used cut-up pieces of gummy worms to look like the other ingredients inside the sushi.
The Coziest Cake
It seems like bakers have figured out how to make just about anything out of cake these days. A hat may not exactly scream celebration, but you've got to admit that this is pretty impressive. The icing is piped into the exact pattern of a knit weave, which we imagine must have taken quite a while to complete. We're not sure how the baker did it, but we'd love to see them in action.
The cake would be perfect to enjoy on a cold winter day, even without a party. Sometimes you don't need a real reason to celebrate - the cake itself is reason enough.
Bigfoot's Cake
We thought this cake was part of a storybook at first, can you believe that it's actually entirely edible? Not just edible, it actually sounds pretty delicious going by the description from its baker. Oftentimes highly intricate cakes sacrifice taste for presentation to some degree, but this cookie-cake contains chocolate shortbread, chocolate-hazelnut pralinè, cocoa nib crunch, salted caramel, chocolate sponge soaked in rum syrup, and rum ganache. Our mouths are watering!
Many bakers stick with fondant when it comes to sculpting their cakes, but this baker even used some of her ingredients to create the picture. The ground is made of the cocoa nib crunch!
Look at This Cake, Isn't It Neat?
Mermaid cakes are another trend that has become popular with many bakers over the last few years, and this is one of the most beautiful takes on an 'under the sea' dessert that we've come across. Rebecca from Bec Makes Cakes is just a home baker, but based on this you'd think she was a seasoned professional. We love the way she incorporated so many different colors into the design.
The baker airbrushed some of the decorations with a gold food dye to add a little shimmer and used pearl candies and sprinkles as bubbles to create an underwater effect.
Kitty Cat Cake
While there are plenty of super-realistic-looking cakes out there, this one is just a little too lifelike. We'd be a bit uncomfortable cutting into it given how much it looks like an actual cat. That said, its realness is how we know that the baker (or should we say the artist) who created it did a phenomenal job. What's even more impressive is that the entire thing was sculpted using buttercream.
Bakers ofter use a special kind of chocolate known as modeling chocolate, which is made with corn syrup, when creating highly detailed pieces, but this baker decided to keep it old school.
A Striped Surprise
We had the perfect pie, and now we've got the ideal cake for the Year of the Tiger. This cake looks cool enough on the outside with its bright orange frosting and black sprinkles (which would also make for a great Halloween cake), but the inside is almost hypnotic with this unique tiger-striped effect. The technique for making cakes like this is actually much simpler than you'd think just by seeing the finished product.
White batter is separated based on how many different colors of stripes the baker wants in the cake and then dyed accordingly. They're then poured back into the cake pan in layers before baking!
Cake-Ception
There's something kind of funny about the idea of making a cake look like donuts. It's one thing to make cookies that resemble sushi, but to make a dessert out of another dessert seems a little redundant. Nevertheless, this cake by Marc from Le Doux Collage caught our attention as something adorable, whimsical, and incredibly unique! Cakes like this where the objects appear to be suspended in the air are called "gravity-defying" cakes.
If you look closely, you'll see that the donuts aren't ordinary donuts - the top one is a unicorn, the middle on a narwhal, and the one coming out of the box is a cat!
Sweet and Simple
Have you ever seen such a picture-perfect berry? Another take on "cake made to look like other foods," this giant chocolate-covered strawberry is a supersized spin on the classic dessert in cake form, filled with strawberry cream and covered in real chocolate. The cake was carved into the shape of the fruit before being covered in red fondant. Little yellow "seeds" and some leaves were then added to make it more realistic.
Would you prefer to eat a cake like this one, or actual chocolate-covered strawberries instead? They're both delicious but also totally different desserts, it's almost impossible to choose between them!
Mini Macs
The consistency of macaron cookie batter makes it pretty much perfect for creating all kinds of different shapes and designs, as we've seen with the taco and sushi cookies. Unlike regular cookie dough, it's piped onto the baking sheet so it's easy to create lots of small and uniform cookies. This baker had the idea to not just create lots of small cookies but to eat them as a cereal!
Sure, it's probably full of tons of sugar, but think about it - cereals like Cocoa Puffs and Cookie Crisp are eaten for breakfast all the time and they're considered totally acceptable.
Gilded Violets
This is one of the most beautiful cakes that we've ever come across - can you believe that it was created by a completely amateur baker? The layer of white frosting sets the perfect stage for these purple palette knife flowers to shine, and the little gold touches throughout make the cake even more special. The flowers may be made of buttercream, but they look just like the real thing in our opinion.
The baker said that they created this cake for their mom's birthday but it wasn't exactly what they originally had in mind. We'd love to see what else they're capable of!
An Adoughrable Pie
While we've certainly seen plenty of intricate, detailed, highly impressive cakes and pies, in this case, the simplicity is what made this pie stand out to us. Instead of using frosting and food coloring, or using a million little pieces of layered pie dough to create an image, this baker just went with the bare minimum. They used one piece of dough cut strategically into the shape of a giraffe's head and neck.
In this case, it's actually everything that isn't the image that helps us to see the giraffe so clearly. Pumpkin pie was a good choice - he wouldn't stand out so well against apple.
Creepy Cupcakes
A bit more disgusting than some of the other cakes, but no less impressive. These cupcakes were baked to be served as dessert at a murder mystery party, and we'd say the baker kept to the theme very well. The cake itself is chocolate filled with a strawberry jam "blood" filling, and cream cheese frosting on top creates the perfect white base to make the cupcakes look like they're straight from a crime scene.
The glass shards on top are actually hard candy broken into pieces. These are incredibly creepy as far as cupcakes go, but we'd be lying if we said they don't sound delicious.
A Whole New Pie
Another stunner by the creator of the Year of the Tiger pie, this one features crust cutouts in the shape of Princess Jasmine from the movie 'Aladdin'. The baker is incredibly talented and is able to incorporate lots of fine detail into every last inch of their designs. It must take a lot of practice to learn how to cut out pie crusts in such specific shapes so that they all fit together.
They also must have put in a lot of work learning how to paint; Jasmine looks just like she does in the movie. The pie looks almost too pretty to eat.
Light the Menorah!
Why buy a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah when you can just bake a cake instead? Of course, you'd have to bake a new one every night for eight nights, but who would complain about eight days of cake? Based on the four candles to the right and three to the left of the blue one, it looks like this cake was created to serve on the seventh night of the holiday.
The baker even used a traditional Hanukkah treat to decorate this dessert! Gelt, or chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, are often given to children as a gift while playing the game of Dreidel.
Candy Cake
A little isomalt goes a long way in this three-layer splash cake. The same sugar substitute used to create the raindrops on the Iceland cake as well as the splash effect on the Bordeaux-colored one is featured again on this multicolored showstopper. Isomalt needs to be liquified in order to work with it, and when it re-hardens it takes on a kind of glassy, liquidy look. Like a lollipop, but much more fun.
We love the colors that the baker chose to dye the isomalt here. It'd be really cool if they also added some flavor - maybe blue raspberry, watermelon and grape?
Cake of Hearts
Elegant with just a hint of a dark side, this confection is fit for a Red Queen. The cake was heavily dusted with a deep red edible glitten before being topped with a layer of white fondant, which features heart-shaped cutouts and a subtle lace pattern. The fondant is cut so that it appears to be dripping over the red cake, and a rogue white heart remains at the base of the cake.
How would you feel about eating a cake covered in so much edible glitter? Would you try it, or would you prefer to stick with a more traditional buttercream frosting?
A Delicious Dupe
The sneakiest way to eat your vegetables, this veggie tray is by far our favorite take on a dessert made to look like another food. The baker was asked to bring a platter of crudites to an event and decided to prepare a tray of cookies instead, except the cookies were all decorated so that they resembled raw vegetables. She even added a little edible glitter to the broccoli to give it some texture!
The "dip" in the center is also a cookie, but it would be a great idea to fill it with some kind of frosting for dipping the cookies into as well.
Cake on Pooh Corner
This Winnie the Pooh cake is proof that even self-taught home bakers can create stunning works of edible art. The entire image, minus the floating balloon and the leaves at the top of the tree, was hand-painted using food dyes onto a layer of white fondant, and yet the whole scene appears to pop off the "page." It's a beautiful tribute to a story that so many know and love.
The balloon is made from a cut-out piece of wafer paper that was also handpainted to match the scene, then positioned with a wire so that it appears to be pulling Pooh up.
Pooh Cake or Cake for Pooh?
Honey Cake usually means a classic Russian dessert made with local honey and layers of tangy cream cheese frosting but in this case, it just means a cake designed and decorated to pay homage to Winnie Pooh's favorite snack - the chubby little bear often got his head stuck in a honey pot as he indulged. This baker decided to create their own little 'hunny' pot out of cake.
What stood out to us about this cake is that it's a pretty simple design and yet at the same time absolutely adorable. We wonder if the cake inside is made with real honey!
Cakey Monster
If Cookie Monster is himself made out of cake, does that make him a cannibal? What if the cake is a cookie cake? We have so many questions. In this case, the baker made a cookie dough flavored cake and then piped the whole thing in blue buttercream to create Cookie Monster's fur, dipped cookies in melted white chocolate for his eyes, and then stuffed a bunch of chocolate chip cookies in his mouth.
Cookie Monster made of cookies is kind of a weird concept, but only if you think about it too much. Anyway, cookie dough and cake together sound like an absolutely delicious combination.
Best Dressed, Best Baked
Liz Joy from Inspired to Taste likes to do what she calls "cookie-fying" her outfits - making cookies that match her clothes. It kind of reminds us of a paper doll; maybe one day she'll make a cookie version of herself to put them on. The cookie clothes look very similar to the real thing and it's clear she's a very detail-oriented baker. Her lacy sweater must have taken a while to get right.
The most impressive part is the way she's able to so accurately capture both the patterns and the textures of each item of her clothing, she doesn't just paint them flat.
Pie See the Light
Another day, another pie crust designed to look like a Disney princess. That's how the saying goes, right? Anyway, we think this Rapunzel pie is anything but ordinary. The princess herself and all the stars in the sky were created using a chocolate pie crust placed on top of a blueberry filling. The baker then drew on the pieces with royal icing colored with food dye to fill in all of the details.
Her magical hair, which is supposed to have healing properties, is made of marshmallow fondant dyed yellow and twisted into a beautiful braid. The baker tied it all together with little touches of gold.