After studying painting at New York’s Grand Central Atelier, she began baking for her friends’ restaurant, Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, in Hudson, N.Y., a few years ago, then started her online business — each one-of-a-kind cake is sold by email from her Manhattan apartment — in 2018 after refining an impasto style that betrays what she calls the “tight” Victorian look of traditional cakes, where lines are clean and excess frosting is swept away.
While their work is aesthetically distinct, these bakers are unified not only in their zany, maximalist approaches but in their rejection of their discipline’s traditions, whether it’s the recent fondant-covered smoothness evangelized on TV by so-called cake bosses, or the standard fare of the suburban American bakery, where piped filigree and buttercream rosettes were popularized over the course of the 20th century.
Though the cakes may seem at first glance like joyous follies, ready to topple under the weight of their own Rainbow Brite frosting, the women behind them say they’re rallying against nostalgia and perfection in part because there’s no use looking back, because things are neither clean nor ideal as a pandemic rages on and fires or floods overtake America’s coasts.
Ultimately, though, a cake’s appeal rests in its ephemerality — that moment before it’s cut into and forever destroyed — particularly at a time when young artists in all mediums are reckoning with human consumption and the material waste their work may produce.
At top: Kwaidan Editions jacket, $570, dress, $1,380, tights, $570, and shoes, $880, ssense.com.