The Symbolism of Hyper-Realistic Cakes
What's the deal with the trend of hyper-realistic cakes in popular culture?
First of all, hyper-realistic cakes is definitely an actual pattern and it’s become more and more prominent for years now. It feels like it started with Cake Boss when I was a teenager and by now there’s a few prominent shows about it and whole communities of influencers participate in this genre of content on social media platforms. Cake decorating has become an art in itself just as graffiti and tattooing have become forms of art in our culture. So, if Jonathan Pageau can make a video about the “ice cream licking challenge” that happened a few years ago and is now long forgotten, then surely this is even more solidified as a pattern and undoubtedly contains some meaning regarding where we’re at in our society.
Illusion and magic
Pageau was asked during a Q&A what the meaning of hyper-realistic cakes were and his response was that it’s similar symbolism to hyperrealist paintings. It’s about creating a representation so strong that it becomes more and more indistinguishable from the thing it’s representing. Illusion is already an interesting topic to explore and I think it’s been on the increase since the Renaissance all the way up to our current world of the internet, virtual reality, social media avatars, artificial intelligence, and generally falling into or forgetting the body, that is, recreationally failing to identify the body according to its correct logos/identity, but playing with the idea that the body is independent, non-existent, elsewhere simultaneously or whatever. —Basically playing with and manipulating representation. God tasked Adam with naming the animals, right, well this practice of hyper-realistic representation is exactly about creating confusion around that task as a form of play. (Again, virtual reality gaming is a great illustrative example.) Creating illusions is a form of magic; obscuring things such that they can’t be taken at face value, loosening the connection between heaven and earth. Technology, Hollywood, pornography, contraception, make-up and entertainment in general all tend to be part of this.
The unique qualities of cake
In addition to the basic pattern of illusion, the cake thing has its own particularities as well. Why is it cake anyways? Why don’t people make hyper illusory objects that are typically revealed to be jelly beans or honey or carrots? Why a food at all?
A competitor in this trend is chocolate. You often see people making huge impressive statues out of chocolate that you wouldn’t believe is chocolate. But on its own chocolate has a different emphasis, because with cakes it’s specifically about the moment where the illusion is broken by slicing into the object and revealing its hidden cake nature. Chocolate doesn’t have this dimensional quality to the same extent. Cake is literally layered, and it’s a composite made of visibly distinct parts with an inside and an outside. These qualities allow for a play on unity, multiplicity and confusion. Cake can look like anything from the outside, but its inside is always identifiable as cake. Chocolate is just chocolate, it can be modelled, painted and textured (making it very helpful to help create hyper-realistic cakes), but the surprise reveal is specifically in the cake.
Cake has layers
So what is the meaning of cake? Cake is a great image of fractal hierarchy because of its typical shape, both with the stacking of layers but then also the stacking of tiers. The mountain shape is reminiscent to a certain “Image of Everything” we are used to hearing about. It is then an image of order, hierarchy, balance between unity and multiplicity, totality.
Recreation
But that's not all because obviously it's also a food that’s common at celebrations, parties and festivals. It’s specifically a dessert that's associated with “re-creation”, turning, or achieving a milestone: weddings, birthdays, new opportunities. And like all desserts it’s also quite related to the marginal and clown world: non-nutritional, pleasurable communion. That is, if the meal is the “bread”, the stable, reliable, nutritional, consistent part, then the dessert is part of team “wine”, the more dynamic, recreational part that is technically meaningless in terms of adding nutrition, but it completes the meal. (Recall the eternal opposition and competition between consistency and completeness.)
What does it mean then to cut into cake? Since cake is an image of reality/hierarchy, having and cutting into it is a symbol of both a celebration of and a breakdown of that reality. Blowing out candles is the same thing: you set up the candles, light them (meaning, identity, consciousness) and then you blow the whole thing out. A piñata is similar: you build the thing, decorate it, set it up, and then the whole point is to enjoy destroying it. This is a common theme in partying. The wedding cake is a particularly good example because it’s an image of the domain of the husband and his bride - it’s their world, their hierarchy, with them at the top, and then they cut into it, they break it down, sacrifice it, and share it with all their friends and family who are there to celebrate their very union. The fact that this moment of cake-cutting at weddings has become a ritual in itself proves my point.
As I’ve already alluded to, the Eucharist is similar, and if we're going to talk about the representation of something VS the thing itself, the incarnation is literally all about this question. But let’s not digress into theology, the point is that the Eucharist is Christ breaking His body and giving His blood (“cutting into the cake”, so to speak, breaking unity), and in that death, the Scriptures are fulfilled (just as the meal finds completeness with the dessert), new life is imparted, and ultimately we have the revelation and the Holy Spirit. It's really back to the same pattern of the possibility of glory in death. When something breaks down, dies, it opens up, and the revealed multiplicity is both scandalous in a certain manner, as well as potentially glorious and life-giving if done properly according to the will of God. This is what makes it "re-creational", restarting creation. The resurrection.
As a side-note: I know I made a huge leap here from cake to the crucifixion. It’s important not to blur lines and confuse these levels, they are vastly different in cosmic importance, and yet, the comparison is analogical and helpful. Besides, if it’s true that Christ is the Logos, the source of creation, then why are we at all surprised that we can relate just about anything to Him and that His story would be a judge and a standard for anything and everything on this earth. So let me proceed…
Piercing and knowing
Once we start talking about cutting into something we are also talking about the symbolism of “pinning down” and penetrating in general. Trying to “pierce” something, enter into it, is trying to name it, to identify it, even trying to make it yours or at least reasonably contain it. This has a sexual aspect, hence in Scripture the sexual act is described as a man “knowing” his wife or “entering” her. Pageau discusses this notion of containment, control and knowing at length in his video about King David, explaining how the tyrannical king Saul wanted to account for everything, including his destined replacement, David, who he proceeded to try to pin to a wall with a spear. Likewise when we talk about understanding something, we talk about “grasping” it, or “getting” it. This all ultimately relates to Christ being nailed to the cross - the worldly powers trying to pin Christ down, thinking “now we have Him”.
So how does this relate to the cake thing? Imagine you have an object, let’s say, a bag of Doritos. It has a certain unity, that is, it’s identifiable and can be named (that is, a bag of Doritos), despite the fact that obviously it has many different components and elements at different levels, like presumably atoms and molecules, wrapper, ink, potato, flavouring, lots of air…
So you think you got this down. How about take a closer look… Well, it looks like you were wrong. It’s not a bag of Doritos, after all, you’ve been thwarted. The real answer is cake. Everything you know can now be called into question and that reflects on you.
Piercing something is about trying to really know what it is, it’s about gaining knowledge. Science itself, as a pursuit of material knowledge, is all about cutting into things. So, can you see how this whole little trick with the cake is about subverting expectations, interrogating preconceived knowledge, and ultimately even making a joke out of the notion of knowledge and identity?
Centre and margin
Imagine living in a universe where everything, upon further investigation, is actually cake in disguise. Not Logos, not God, not anything meaningful, just cake. It would be a superficial universe, that is, a universe of surface, where identity doesn’t have real depth or consequence anymore and the margins has devoured the centre. Cake is an image of everything, yes, but only because it’s the tip of the ice-berg that is really everything. You get to the cake when you’ve already gotten to the meal, when you’re at the end of a year, the end of your single life, the end of your exams, whatever. And so, that’s where our culture is. At the end. And that’s why in our world right now anything can be turned into cake, everything’s a joke, and anything could happen at any moment —and we love it.
One last thing
I said earlier in this essay that illusion is about confusing the representation of a thing with the thing itself. Then later I mentioned that this problem of representation (image) is exactly what the Incarnation of Christ addresses, being the Son (the image/representation) of God, and yet also fully being God Himself. Why can God do this and not hyper-realistic cakes? He can really have His cake and eat it too? Yes, because He’s God, because He can really contain all of reality in Himself in a way that cake can’t, and that’s because He’s the source of all reality. The reason why God fills all of creation is because it’s in Him that things find their own identity, as well as God’s. There’s a wonderful article on the Symbolic World blog by JP Marceau that addresses this. He quotes David Schindler, "The independence that things enjoy is not in any opposition to their dependence on God, because he is in fact the very source of their independence." Everything revealing Logos is therefore not an illusion, but the fulfilment of whatever identity it is that’s being revealed, and truly the glory of God.
Thank you writing this. I won’t look at a birthday cake in the same way again.