As you are aware if you are a fan of the blog, Marnay and I enjoy eating out. But since we can’t eat out all the time, we follow a lot of chefs, restaurants and bloggers on social media. That way, we can stay up to date with what’s going on in the food scene.

One unmistakeable trend that I’ve seen recently is the rise of cake. Huge cakes that beget huge slices. I had never seen this much cake being served in restaurants. The question: Why? Why now?

I’ve seen huge cakes all over my Instagram lately. In fact, Marnay and I went to the café at Maketto and had a ginormous piece of (very tasty) carrot-walnut cake. We also were recently at Elle on a weekday morning and saw the prettiest cake we had ever seen in their pastry case. A perfectly smooth, symmetrical cake covered with purple and white icing and simply a few blackberries on top. It looked like cake perfection.

I think that nostalgia is a factor in the great cake revival of 2018. Everyone has memories of eating birthday cake, or baking a cake with their parents. More regionally, you may have memories of Jersey diners and their display cases of innumerable types of cakes.

Pete Wells recently wrote a brilliant article in the New York Times about the proliferation of ice cream sundaes on dessert menus in New York, often as the only dessert. Restaurants claim that this is for nostalgia reasons, but Pete Wells astutely points out that the real reason is likely because anyone can make ice cream and this means that restaurants do not have to hire a pastry chef.

Cakes are also relatively straightforward restaurant desserts. Once the cake is made, it does not take much effort to slice it into individual portions. However, a lot of work goes into making a well-executed cake. How do you find the perfect balance between cake and icing? What is the right flavor combination? How can you blow people away?

I think that cakes have been undervalued for too long. Perhaps because people have eaten it at every birthday party since they were a child, and had so many bland, dried-out examples, that cake gets overlooked. It takes a lot of talent and effort to make these cakes. They can be visually stunning and taste great at the same time.

This is a trend that I hope continues…cakes are not just for birthdays anymore!