The latest cake trend involves setting it on fire

Have you seen any videos of the latest cake decorating trend? It’s popped up in the last couple of days on my social media feeds, and this trend is literal fire. According to an article on Eater, “Burn-away cakes have gotten over 174 million views on TikTok since they gained traction on the platform earlier this month.” So what is a burn-away cake? It happens when the top of a fully-decorated, normal looking cake is burned away with a flame, revealing a different design underneath.

The technique has been around for a couple of years, but was popularized by Canadian baker Namaya Navaratnarajah, whose TikTok videos have garnered tens of millions of views.  “Honestly, I am in disbelief,” she told Eater. Ellen Degeneres had a burn-away cake for her birthday, which resulted in a People magazine article that further fueled the craze.

To achieve the effect, a thin piece of decorated, edible wafer paper is placed atop a cake decorated with buttercream. A thin border of icing separates the wafer paper from the iced cake. Since the wafer paper burns much more readily than the sugar icing underneath, it is consumed by the flame to reveal the underlying design. If you want to replicate this effect, Navaratnarajah and others have posted tutorials you can follow. One requirement is a printer that will print with edible ink; there are services such as Ink4Cakes that will provide the printed image if you don’t have one.