By Angelica Zhiyu Luo

Medill Reports

At Chicago’s WDNR (read: wonder) Museum, more than 260 fake cakes snuggle amid a landscape of faux whipped buttercream. The floor? It’s paved with plastic sprinkles. 

Chicago-based artist Anna Lasbury, 27, installed canvas-rendered vintage cakes on three walls. Piped with imitation cream, the cakes bear fake frosting quotes and resemble their real-deal counterparts from head (maraschino cherry) to toe (fluffy frosting), only forever preserved and smush-resistant. But beyond exhibitions, boutique windows and Etsy storefronts, imitation cakes are a meaningful niche art offering creators and fans warmth. 

“Cake is a medium of sense memory – like when you smell something, it can transport you to another place,” Lasbury said. “You almost only exclusively have cake when celebrating something. It surrounds monumental moments of our lives. So I think when people see one, it takes them back to those moments.”

A polar opposite to the “is-it-cake?” trend, where bakers model baked goods after non-cake objects and only break the disguise once cutting a slice, faux sweet treats are also an art. In fact, the internet is so obsessed with ornamental fake sweets that this maximalist, sugary aesthetic earned multiple mentions on Pinterest’s top trend prediction for 2025. Inspired by one another, creators across the U.S. developed their own sentimental and creative takes on the craft. 

Under the brand name Crappy Cake Art, Lasbury creates and scatters pieces around Chicago, making herself known as the city’s “forbidden” pâtissier and an advocate of imperfection. “Spreading joy one fake cake at a time” is her motto, but, interestingly enough, Lasbury is neither a baker nor a birthday cake eater.

“I usually do ice cream,” she said with a sheepish grin. 

Nonetheless, she sees a nostalgic sentiment underlining even the most generic, fuzzy mental image of a cake and aims to awaken past joy through her art. “I want the cakes to be a maximalist mosaic of sense recall. And memory. And emotion,” she said. “Something that you could step into and then exist in that world for a moment.” 

Her installation, “Life is Messy,” takes inspiration from this cognitive association. Even before the exhibition officially began, Lasbury felt people’s resonance: A woman saw her work and was moved to tears. 

“She pointed to a cake and was like, ‘My son passed away and he always used to say this to me, word for word,’” Lasbury said. “We hugged and talked for a long time. It was beautiful.”

Recently, the Crappy Cake artist collaborated with Chicago hot dog stand and bar Wieners Circle. She made a pink piece that reads “Bad Bitches Play Bingo” – a namesake of the venue’s bingo party. Participant Aditi Tripathy took this cake home. Tripathy said she had seen faux pastries art online and found them “fascinating,” even prior to the game night. Additionally, not only was this the first time she won a bingo prize, she had also just moved into a new apartment. 

“I want to move away from decorating with things that are very generic,” Tripathy said. “So I’m trying to bring personalized touches, and there’s nothing more personalized than something that has a story attached to it.” 

For Vonell Kinderknecht, a Colorado-based creative and founder of Bogus Bakery, fake cake is also an emotional and storytelling art. “I’m ADHD, neurodivergent and a chronic illness warrior with complex PTSD,” she said. Unable to work a regular nine-to-five job, this baking enthusiast said she considers it “a huge blessing to work and contribute to society” through her fake pastries. 

Despite constantly innovating new knickknacks resembling foods, ranging from cupcake candle holders to bacon-and-egg earrings, Kinderknecht keeps her prices affordable. “We really connect food with our happy places,” she said. “I try to have something priced for everybody, so they can always walk away with something fun.”

Casandra Bentley, founder of ButtercreamDaydream, echoed this sentiment. She started this side job to “survive and keep afloat” but now wishes to focus on fake cake art. 

“Everybody says, ‘You eat first with your eyes,’” she said. “We are all drawn to food by the way it looks. And knowing you can keep this thing makes it like an actual daydream.”

In Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Beth Townsend creates both fake and edible cakes – she acknowledges the relationship-building powers of both. As a Food Network star and repeat champion of baking shows, Townsend sculpts real pastries into whimsical characters but sees faux vintage sweets as a symbol of nostalgia.

“My mom and my grandma did a ton of baking for everybody, and people used to have real cakes on their counters,” she said. “It gives people that feeling of home and coziness.” 

As niche as this art seems, creators tend to draw inspiration from their lives. For instance, Hallie Cooke, founder of Etsy shop RainbowMoonDesignsCo, first learned about this creative avenue during her one-year stay in Okinawa, Japan. It has now been nine years since the trip exposed her to Sampuru art, realistic food models for menu display, and the Decoden art style, a maximalist craft of embellishing plain surfaces with imitation cream, charms and pearls. 

Meanwhile, Mexican-Texan singer-songwriter Lizzie Astorga incorporates faux cake art into her music career. “When I started opening up for big artists and had deals with Live Nation, I would make cakes and give them to artists I would open up for,” she said. “One of them was (Mexican guitarist and singer) Carla Morrison.” 

This backstage moment of Morrison unwrapping the gift garnered nearly 45,000 likes on TikTok, which “really picked up sales,” according to Astorga. Now, she has been creating and selling under her brand kimoshicakes for almost three years. 

In fact, this multimedia talent sees a parallel between the rise of cake art and popular music. Astorga identifies pop icons Chappell Roan and Melanie Martinez as major inspirations of this aesthetic, naming Roan specifically as the trend’s kickstarter. 

“Chappell featured a cake that said ‘Karma’ in her music video,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, opportunity!’”

Astorga contended that fake food art is on the rise, but she also noticed larger corporations picking up the trend as well. “If you go to Ross, Marshall’s, Target, especially with Valentine’s Day, they’ve been selling a lot of fake cake trinket boxes,” she said. Fans also reported to her that Temu used pictures of her work, without authorization, as its own products. 

Yet, this young artist sees the silver lining. “It pushes small business owners to go toward the custom route, which a lot of people are willing to pay for,” Astorga said. “There’s nothing better than knowing that someone actually made something for you.”

Angelica Zhiyu Luo is a graduate student at Medill specializing in magazine reporting.