As the firehose of bad news sprays ceaselessly, little seems powerful enough to staunch the flow or even momentarily relieve the sting. Except cake. The bigger, the bolder, the more unafraid of any imaginary limits, the better: Barbie-pink ruffles, lakes of deep-purple jam, and an entire bouquet of long-stem flowers poking in every direction.

Cakes stretching the length of a table, dripping with intricate vintage piping, or studded with glazed peach halves and showered in crumbled Froot Loops embrace chaos and radiate joy. They brim with unmitigated absurdity, whoop-de-dos, and plenty of razzmatazz. Cake maximalism makes a strong argument that even at the gravest of times, frivolity is essential.

It takes unmitigated delight in the kind of silly scribbles and exciting colors often belittled as “girlie,” with the subtext of uselessness. Oversize frosted bows, caramel-filled shells with oodles of shiny stem-on cherries, and wavy ribbons curving all over the surface like a buttercream river bring a specific type of energy to the table: eccentric, fantastical, joyous. Femininity that replaces the meek, cottage-core, tradwife concept with a feisty, free-form idea defined only by those expressing it. Cake appears somewhere around “cute bathing suit” in the hierarchy of needs, and lavishing it with unrestrained excess, almost entirely for aesthetic purposes, presents a wonderfully innocuous form of pleasure. But maximalist cakes also use the most vacuous things—empty calories, superfluous decoration, extra of everything—to create powerful beauty. It is the exact antidote to everything else happening in the world, and the trend’s growth in Seattle shows that’s exactly what people want.

Buttercream Balm

No matter what else is going on, cake makes any moment a celebration, noticed Emily Kim, cofounder of The Pastry Project, as she watched the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. Despite the destruction of their town, the people in the film still threw a party, complete with cake, which they were excited about. “Cake can make you just feel OK for a minute,” says Kim.

Cake maximalism takes that notion, like it does everything, to the extreme. “It feels like, OK, let’s just make cake wild and beautiful.” It appeals in the same way TV shows like The Gilded Age do, she posits: an over-the-top escapist fantasy that ignores the stressful reality of the world for a minute to focus on something beautiful and fun.

The escapism of cake extends to the bakers, too: “Being able to have that decorative element to express yourself is just such a breath of fresh air,” says Gabby Park, the executive chef of Paper Cake Shop in Wallingford.

The elaborate, multilayer piping and excessive swoops are a long way from the understated monochrome cakes of recent years and the last decoration megatrend, naked cakes, which completely forgo frosting on the sides. “'I’ve been doing cake for like, 10 years, and I just feel like it’s always been very minimalist designs that have dominated,” says Tracy Marcella, the head chef at Queen Anne’s Bake Shop. “It’s been getting kind of boring.”

When she saw a New York Times article about classic Lambeth-style cakes reimagined with fresh, bold colors, it inspired her to marry that with her own style. She eschews food coloring in favor of colorful foods, using the fancy frosting work to hem in glistening ponds of rich berry jam, circling yellow calamansi curd in black currant mascarpone. “Pools of curd are really, really beautiful, but they’re also just one of the most delicious things you can have on cake,” Marcella says.

Thick rivers of combed vanilla buttercream break up the raspberry jam–covered surface of one of her olive oil sheet cakes. Frosting flowers imitate the real pansies in a dozen shades of purple tucked around the cake. “Doing the piping work is almost mesmerizing, and a little therapeutic,” Marcella says. “I think some of that comes through in the final product: That the baker was having a lot of fun doing this.”

Play Therapy

“My biggest insecurity growing up was being too much,” says Maddy O’Donnell of Maddy’s Bakeshop. “Now, as an adult, I love that, and really lean in and make everything I create too much.” On Sundays at the Ballard Farmers Market, she sells croissants topped with a whole pickled pepper or coated in rainbow sprinkle icing, and her cakes look like they rolled through a florist’s shop on their way to the table. She often watches Bravo shows like Real Housewives or Love Island while making cakes, and brings table-flip levels of emotion to her decoration.

O’Donnell started baking when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she searched on Google for what to do when you’re sad. She ended up loving it and soon traded in the pantsuits of the PR world for a pastry school apron. Unfortunately, that was January 2020, and her Zoom baking classes didn’t quite mesh with her personal philosophy.

O’Donnell’s style leans toward her floor-length strawberry coat and shrimp cocktail earrings. Her apartment features a salt and pepper shaker collection and glass grapes hanging from the ceiling. “It’s fun,” she says. “Things shouldn’t ever be not fun.”

After she dropped out, she quickly escalated from sprinkling a few flower petals here and there to several bouquets on one small cake. Her cakes began to reflect her own offbeat enthusiasm and bring an energy that she describes as chaotic femininity: loud, expressive, and girlie, just as O’Donnell sees herself. “Especially with the political climate, it’s so fun to be unapologetically feminine,” she says. “Disrupting the norm, even if it’s just with a cake, it’s still powerful.”

The Logic Behind the Chaos

Last year, Molly’s Bottle Shop in Ballard celebrated its five-year anniversary by cutting into a 10-foot dark chocolate Maddy’s Bakeshop cake with espresso buttercream, piles of rainbow sprinkles, and many colors of mums, carnations, and waxflowers. O’Donnell plans to make another loooooong cake for her upcoming wedding, and disrupting norms is only part of her motivation. “I don’t want to put cake on cake,” she says. “I want all that square footage to be covered in squiggles and flowers.”

For all its whimsy and disorder, cake maximalism rests on solid logical ideals, as evidenced by how Seattle’s pioneer in the art form came to the style. When Park was hired as executive chef of Paper Cake Shop by Rachel Yang of Revel and Joule, she thought through the unique demands of selling sheet cake by the piece. “I wanted each slice of cake to look like a plated dessert,” Park says. The cakes needed color, crunch, and multiple garnishes, and each piece had to get all the elements to maintain consistency.

The classically trained artist translated her oil painting experience into decoration, crafting each cake into a piece of art. But while she took a “more is more” approach, it wasn’t to the point of form over function. “My focus was to make sure all of our garnishes were edible, and really cute and fun to look at.”

Park found inspiration on Instagram, but creating something visually stunning and that tastes good enough to keep customers coming back complicates the task. Ironically, it takes organization and training to make the lavish, exuberant cakes Paper Cake Shop does at scale. She pairs agar agar–based key lime gelée with pandan buttercream and candied ginger. Her iconic Keel Bill lemon cake features a pink layer of raspberry frosting, dollops of darker blackberry jam, hollow anemones of buttercream filled with lychee gel, and Froot Loops crunch.

Though the visual wow factor helps on social media, it isn’t just about creating something TikTok loves. “It brings the party to the party,” says Park. “People want to feel special. Getting a cake that is so unique and artfully decorated just makes people feel very cherished.”

But if it were just about the end beauty, cakes could take all sorts of artistic formats; maximalist cakes send out specific vibes. Where pastry chefs once pressed delicate edible petals flat onto cakes, now whole flowers stick up at artistically awkward angles; wonky domes replace neatly stacked layers. It is not, to use a word as trendy last year as maximalist cakes are now, demure.

“Walk into a room with a hot pink cake covered in flowers and bows and squiggles, that’s just a way to—maybe even silently—celebrate: We’re not small. We’re large,” says O’Donnell. “Here’s my insanely cute cake. That’s loud, you know?”

In a world that pressures women to avoid making ripples, cake maximalism encourages bigger, better, and buttercream waves. The complete ignorance of limitations and wholehearted embrace of things often derided as frivolous symbols of little girls—flowers, pink, doodle-y shapes—makes the trend a paradigm of chaotic femininity. It provides temporary, harmless distraction from the ills of the outside world, and turns any moment into a party. More than anything, maximalist cakes are just damn fun.