As a teenager, the Viennese food stylist and baker Sophia Stolz, 29, was often befuddled by the fancy, prim desserts served at her friends’ birthday celebrations. Despite all the money spent on outfits and party décor, the cakes tended to be “so boring!” she says. Now, she’s baking cakes that are, in her words, “a bit rough,” with icing that’s often black or blood red, razor-sharp piping that brings to mind daggers or horns and toppers that might include dismembered doll parts. The finishing touch: messages such as “I hate people” in place of the usual “Happy Birthday!” or “Congratulations!” Hard-edged and punk influenced, her style has attracted brands including Bulgari, Hermès and Miu Miu — all of which have ordered her confections. For a private client, she recently did a Balenciaga-inspired cake that was pierced all over with silver septum rings.
Stolz, who started baking at age 15 as a form of therapy after being bullied in school and developing an eating disorder, isn’t the only baker forgoing the aggressively cheerful aesthetic that has long dominated the pastry world. The Berlin-based baker Hana Betakova, 30, started her business, Rustcakes, in 2020 and attributes the current craze for goth cakes to the pervasive sense of doom that descended during the pandemic. According to Betakova, “the reason these cakes are happening right now is because artists started to bake during Covid.” Originally from the Czech Republic, Betakova was already working for a larger bakery before lockdown but “felt very limited by the designs I was doing,” she says. Now, her offerings — which she sometimes makes for tattoo artists in exchange for their services — include spiky, almost swampy-looking cakes that exude “drippy horror tenderness,” she says.
The Brooklyn-based New Zealander Amy Yip, 33, left her job as a print designer in the fashion industry in 2022 to start her pastry business, Yip Studio. Her goal: to “make something you wouldn’t see anyone else doing.” Rock Owens, a coal-colored, edible boulder that pays homage to the perpetually black-clad fashion designer Rick Owens, is certainly that, as is the strawberry-flavored mound that she covered in globby trails of ebony-hued icing and topped with blackberries and black calla lilies for a client she describes in the accompanying Instagram caption as “a goth who only wears weird tentacle-y pieces from [Comme des Garçons] … and hates anything bohemian.”
Of course, an unusual cake calls for an unconventional occasion. “I haven’t made a funeral cake yet, but I guess there is such a thing,” says Stolz. She has done a few divorce cakes, however, and one, she says, for a “very exclusive sex party.”
“I don’t know what happened to that cake,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t want to know.”
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