A new food trend is spreading on TikTok like wildfire.
Bakers on the platform have been wowing viewers by setting their cakes ablaze, resulting in visuals as impressive as a magician’s reveal. Called “burn-away cakes,” the confectionery trend has taken off in the past month, with the hashtag #burnawaycake racking up over 180 million views and counting.
What are burn-away cakes?
The videos start with a cake decorated with a printed image. Then, that image is lit on fire and smoothly burns away, revealing another image beneath it. Simple, right?
This bit of sugary visual trickery has appeared on tons of creative confections, from Valentine’s Day heart-shaped cakes to gender reveal cakes to pop culture-inspired cakes. Even Ellen DeGeneres recently got in on the trend with a burn-away birthday cake.
Iterations of the burn-away cakes have popped up around the world, from Indonesia to Mexico. And while the inventor of the burn-away cake concept remains uncertain, older videos show that it’s been around for at least a few years.
But it wasn’t until a pair of bakers in two different countries made their versions of the burn-away cake that the trend truly exploded.
How burn-away cakes went viral
Illinois-based Denise Steward, who posts as Denise’s Delights on both TikTok and Instagram, was scrolling on Instagram one day last year when she spotted a Spider-Man cake with wires (the “webs”) shooting out of the character’s hands to a sign at the bottom of the board which was transformed by fire.
“It kind of looked like they used the flash paper that magicians use. I was like, ‘That’s really cool,’” Steward tells TODAY.com. “I was like, ‘How could I make that edible?’ So that’s kind of how the wheels started turning in my head.”
Steward, who has been a brand ambassador for Paper 2 Eat, an edible cake decoration company, thought that incorporating one of the company’s edible papers might do the trick. Using a thicker paper frosting base and a thinner top layer, she separates the two with a thick border of piping to ensure the cleanest reveal burn possible.
How Steward made her first cake — and how many others are making their own burn-away cakes now — is highlighted in a blog post about her New Year’s cake that has garnered more than 480,000 views on Instagram. Steward appears to be the first baker to use edible papers in this way to create a burn-away cake.
“I noticed when you put the wafer paper that they have on a cake, the longer it sits, the more it pulls away and doesn’t want to absorb moisture,” Steward says, adding that other types of edible papers, like the frosting sheets that adorn her cake’s base layers, do the opposite. That’s when inspiration struck.
“This was literally the first try. I was just on a whim trying to make it work … and it did,” Steward says.
Steward’s cake was the one that inspired a thousand more — and one Canadian baker has garnered millions and millions of views creating her own versions of it.
“I first came across Denise’s Delights’ burn-away cake right before New Year’s, and I thought that was really impressive,” Namaya Navaratnarajah — @cakesbynams on TikTok — tells TODAY.com. “At the time, they weren’t known as burn-away cakes but I decided to give it a title. I was like, ‘Well, you’re burning something away.’ So it was just right there for me.”
“As soon as I saw it, I messaged my friends and was like, ‘I’m doing this right now. I don’t care.’ I was in bed, but I got out of bed and was like, ‘Let me figure this out,’” she says.
Navaratnarajah’s first cake to go super-viral was her Taylor Swift-inspired cake regarding the hotly-anticipated yet-to-be-announced LP “Reputation (Taylor’s Version).” The dessert starts with an image of Swift’s Instagram page when it was wiped blank and finishes with a reveal a photo of the star wearing a black bodysuit while performing on the “Eras Tour.” The sweet treat tickled Swiftie fandom to the tune of over 20 million views.
“I opened my TikTok to 100,000 views on that first night alone and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ Then it just grew to a million views in a couple of days,” Navaratnarajah says.
But it’s not just that video: The Toronto-based pastry chef is baking up hit after hit. Her her Charmander cake has nearly 37 million views, her “Hunger Games” cake has nearly 25 million views, and her Spider-Man cake has 15 million.
“It’s been an incredible experience and I’m so grateful for all the opportunities that it’s presented me with,” Navaratnarajah says. “The number of orders coming in has been incredible as well. So I’m just grateful for it. I really am.”
