Fancy That Cake | March 2026
Okay, first things first. I know. I KNOW. It’s been eight years since I’ve posted anything on this blog, and I have absolutely no good excuse for that other than the fact that I’ve been busy making cakes! Wedding after wedding, birthday after birthday, shower after shower, and somewhere in that beautiful blur of buttercream and sugar flowers the blog just sort of fell off the radar. But something happened recently that I simply could not let go without talking about, because because if it is affecting the cake world, of all places, then nobody is safe..
Artificial intelligence is designing wedding cakes now. And brides are showing up to consultations with the pictures to prove it.
Let me set the scene. A few months ago, a sweet young bride sat down across from me at a tasting and slid her phone across the table. On the screen was the most breathtaking, ethereal, five-tiered wedding cake I had ever seen in my life. Cascading sugar flowers so delicate they looked like they were still growing right there on the screen. Hand-painted watercolor details that seemed to glow from the inside out. Textures layered on textures on textures. Gold leaf catching some kind of imaginary light that doesn’t even exist in nature. It was jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly stunning.
“I made this with an AI image app,” she said, beaming like she’d just discovered fire.
I picked up the phone. I zoomed in. I zoomed in some more. I turned the phone sideways just to get a better look.
And then I had to have one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in seventeen years of making cakes.
Here’s the thing about AI-generated cake images: they are not bound by the laws of physics. Or gravity. Or sugar. Or anything else that exists in the world where the rest of us live and bake. The flowers in that image had no stems, no wires, no structure connecting them to anything at all. They were simply floating there, soft and perfect and completely impossible, because a computer decided they should float and the computer doesn’t answer to anyone. The bottom tier appeared to be both opaque and translucent at the same time, which is a lovely trick if you can pull it off in the real world, which I promise you cannot. And the proportions of the whole glorious thing were, let’s just say, creative in a way that no baker, no table, and no bride’s budget has ever quite managed to achieve.
I’m not saying any of this to be discouraging! I am saying it because I think it is genuinely important for anyone planning a wedding to understand exactly what they’re looking at when an AI hands them a cake dream on a silver platter.
The funny thing is, this isn’t entirely new territory for those of us in the cake world. Brides have been bringing in Pinterest images for years, and Pinterest had its own version of this same problem. Gorgeous, swoon-worthy photographs of cakes that were either made by the top fraction of one percent of sugar artists on the entire planet, or were photographically staged in ways that real life simply cannot replicate. At least with Pinterest, a human being had actually baked the thing at some point. Somebody’s hands had touched it. With AI, that last filter is completely gone. The computer doesn’t know that sugar flowers need 24 to 48 hours to dry before they can so much as be breathed on. It doesn’t know that buttercream behaves very differently at a July outdoor reception than it does in a climate-controlled ballroom in October. It doesn’t know anything about cake at all. It just knows what looks absolutely magnificent on a screen, and magnificent it delivers every single time.
And listen, I will give it that. The things these tools dream up are genuinely stunning.
But here is what I want every bride and groom and mother of the bride sitting at my table to really hear, because it is the same thing I have been saying since 2009 and it is more true today than it has ever been. The magic of a custom cake is not in the image. It has never been in the image. It is in the hands that made it, the hours poured into it, and the relationship between the artist and the person they are creating it for.
When you sit down with me and we talk through your wedding, when you describe your flowers and your colors and the feeling you want to wash over your guests the moment they walk through those reception doors, something happens that no app on any phone can replicate. I start to see your cake. Not a generated image of a generic cake. Your actual cake, the one that is going to sit on that table on your actual day and feed your actual people and live forever in your actual photographs. That cake takes shape in my head before a single egg gets cracked or a single pan of batter gets put in the oven. And honestly, with all of the tiers and the sugar work and the long nights in the kitchen, that moment right there is still my favorite part of this whole crazy beautiful job.
So yes, please, bring me your AI images! I mean that from the bottom of my heart. They are a wonderful jumping-off point, a way of saying here is the feeling I am after, here is the world I want my cake to live in. Sometimes they spark an idea I never would have arrived at on my own, and that is genuinely exciting to me. But bring them knowing that what we are going to do together is translate that dream into something real. Something that can exist in this world, stand up straight on your reception table, travel across town without incident, and taste like the single best thing your guests have put in their mouths in recent memory. We will keep every bit of the magic. We’ll just quietly solve the physics problems along the way.
The computer can dream it up all day long. And it does a gorgeous job of that.
But somebody still has to bake it.
And that somebody is me. 😊
Fancy That Cake has been creating custom wedding cakes and specialty cakes in Southeast Missouri, Southern Illinois, the St. Louis region, and Western Kentucky since 2009. Call Katie today at 573.200.6428 or email cakes@fancythatcake.com. Let’s talk cake!
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