Fondant is dead. Welcome to Philly’s buttercream revival.
Hyperrealistic cakes made from fondant and featured on reality shows like "Is it Cake?" became fashionable in recent years. But everything old is new again.
In certain kitchens across the city, there are no cakes pretending to be Heinz tomato ketchup bottles. There is no fondant, that thick paste of sugar, water, and corn syrup that molds like clay to become whatever a baker dreams. No one asks if everything is cake.
This is Philly’s buttercream revival. Here, all the cake is just cake.
Some of Philly’s most creative bakers are selling old-fashioned layer cakes decorated with elaborate buttercream piping, for customers who want “a cake to taste like a cake and things to just look the way that they actually look,” said Noelle Wheatley Blizzard of New June Bakery.
Bakers like Blizzard advertise and take orders via Instagram; some are cagey about where exactly they bake, because they do it from home and it’s not entirely legal. (Blizzard, 33, starting baking out of her home in Fairmount during the pandemic, but she now subleases a commercial kitchen space in Kensington).
In recent years, hyperrealistic cakes made from fondant and featured on reality shows like Is it Cake? and Cake Boss became fashionable. But then cake makers and eaters started pointing out that fondant tastes bad — like “the devil’s sugary play-doh,” in the words of Reddit’s FondantHate group (Rule #1: MUST HATE FONDANT). Another commenter lamented: “No cake in a ‘cake looks like object’ video is in fact cake. It is a pound of fondant wrapped around a miserable little piece of bread … a lie wrapped in another lie.”
The backlash against fondant also targets the flawless look of such cakes. Buttercream is more authentic.
“[Customers] honestly want it to look sort of amateur: big, fluffy, messy frosting with vibrant, playful cherries, so that it really, truly looks antique-y and vintage,” said Blizzard.
Blizzard’s cakes, with their buttercream frills and piped pink roses, look like lace doilies and strands of costume pearls, or Belle’s yellow dress in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, if that was a cake instead of a gown. She said her initial style was inspired by London’s Violet Cakes, which made Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding cake. Frosted with Swiss meringue buttercream and featuring lots of fresh flowers, that royal cake had unfinished edges — far from the plastic smoothness of fondant.
On a recent Thursday morning, wearing platform Crocs and a lilac apron, Blizzard deployed an open French star tip to craft a border of lavender buttercream shells on one of her signature heart-shaped cakes. She tested the colors and texture of the icing on a little sheet of white cardboard beside her, a tiny frosting palette.
Nearby, Marissa Touch, New June’s sole other employee, spread Oreo mascarpone whipped cream and graham cracker crumbles on the base of a sheet cake.
Touch, 33, likes that New June’s cakes are nostalgic, but updated with brighter colors and flavors.
“Like a better version of what was,” she said.
Across the city, nostalgic buttercream-frosted cakes with modern flair are having a moment.
Mallory Valvano, the baker behind the ecstatic neon-frosted cakes of Party Girl Bake Club, uses American buttercream with a secret ingredient, drawing inspiration from vintage Wilton’s cake decorating books from the ‘80s.
Baking is Valvano’s side hustle, and she sells her cakes almost entirely on Instagram, with no dreams of a brick-and-mortar shop. Drawing on her grandmother’s buttercream recipe and her great-grandmother’s recipe for ermine frosting (a whipped-cream-like icing made with flour, boiled milk, butter, and sugar), Valvano said her cakes are “a collaborative effort of past and present.”
Buttercream can be easily dyed and manipulated, piped into rosettes with tiny green leaves, or used to make squiggles or ruffles or lace. Ashley Huston, 32, who runs Dream World Bakes out of West Philly, tends to use Italian buttercream (a syrup of butter and sugar mixed with egg whites) and decorates her cakes with seasonal fruit and fresh flowers, adding sugar pearls and edible crystals and glitter along the way.
She gets the appeal of fondant.
“It’s very impressive when people can make a cake look like a baby,” Huston said. But when it comes to buttercream, “it looks and tastes better.”