The TikTok cake trend tested

by Megan Wilkins

TikTok is a place where you can watch a tutorial for anything. you may have heard of the tiktok cake? if not, you have come to the right place.

Find out what happens when Athena's Megan Wilkins, takes on the challenge of making the famous TIKTOK CAKE!

Trying my best to ice the cake

Just about everybody who has TikTok knows how addictive the platform can be. One second you have taken a seat on your bed and it is still light outside, the next streetlamps are on and you have done nothing but scroll through pointless videos for two hours. It has its own time zone, I swear!

The thing is with TikTok, it always gives you exactly what you want to see. A cute video of a Capybara dancing? YES. A video about how to fold clothes for your suitcase so that you get the maximum space possible? YES. A ‘what I eat in a day in New York’ video even though you have never been or are not planning on going any time soon? YES. Whatever it is that it does, it sucks you in to watching a bunch of random 30-second clips for no reason at all.

One of my biggest obsessions on the app is baking. I just love to watch videos of people creating what look like the yummiest sweet treats and saving them for later, knowing that I will never be bothered to even attempt to bake them in the real world.

If you are on the baking side of the app like me, then you will have scrolled through thousands of videos of bakers perfecting their version of the ‘TikTok cake’. Typically, the cake is either round or heart shaped, has a colourful base colour and is decorated in the exact way that Belle’s iconic yellow dress is designed in Beauty and the Beast. Honestly, they look exactly like the type of cake that would be a centre piece at an animated Disney wedding, drapes and all.

In TikTok, they all look insanely beautiful. Every single tutorial on how to make this perfect cake looks exactly that… perfect. Unfortunately, not everyone is a five-star baker. I for one, am certainly not, and if I am to take a wild guess, I would say that 99% of TikTok users are also not. On the other hand, I am also up for a challenge and, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this cake is the easiest thing to bake in the world. Maybe, I will be whipping one of these up for every event I go to for the next 18 months. So, I decided to seize the day and see if these cakes really are as easy, delicious and as Instagramworthy as the app makes out.

Unfortunately, when I first decided to pursue this idea, I envisioned the decorating part but not the actual baking part. I would not say that I am an awful baker, but I would also not say that I am a good one. I can make cookies but not meringues, and scones but not brownies. It really is a 50/50 chance for me. Either my family will receive a really nice treat for pudding, or, I will have already thrown it in the bin with despair.

When making this cake, I decided to go simple… a Victoria sponge. Nothing could go wrong with this, surely? Wrong. The cake mixture was easy enough, equal quantities of everything apart from eggs and baking powder. It seemed to be working well. The actual mixture was a success, but it was the baking that did not go so easily. The first two layers, fine. The third was not the same. I do not know what happened! For some unknown reason, when I tipped the cake onto the cooling rack alongside the other two, it oozed a yellow liquid. Raw cake mixture. After a few seconds of re-evaluating my decision to start this in the first place, I decided to pop it back into the oven for a few more minutes. All is fine. No.

I forgot to set a timer. TWENTY MINUTES went by and out came a singed cake with a large crater in the middle where the seeped cake mixture used to be.

At this point, I was not impressed but decided to power through. I let the three layers cool, yes three, and prepared the icing. Having too many icing colours would be too much for me to handle. Trying to separate one butter icing mixture into five bowls with five different colours would have been an avalanche of icing sugar waiting to happen. So, I made the decision to stick to two main colours. Pink and blue… very Athena!

The same thing happened with the icing. I mixed a load of normal icing, and it tasted amazing. Then, I split the mixture into two bowls and added the colours. Why, oh why, did the blue turn out amazingly fluffy, light and delicious whereas the pink, turned out lumpy, sticky and crunchy? Don’t answer that please. I do know. For some reason, I added a tiny bit of water, as I did not have any milk, to make the mixture a bit thinner. When I say a bit, the tap was on for a little bit too long and from that point on, the pink icing was never the same again, no matter how long that I mixed it for.

Once the cakes had cooled down, I decided to put the layers together and as luck has it, that the third layer I had baked was just about thick enough to split in half and chop off the burnt bit. Thank goodness! I laid the layers on a plate and started to piece it together with jam. As I added one on top of another, they started to slide. Remembering the TikTok hack that I had seen before, out came the skewers and, I placed three in the centre to hold it up. It worked a treat. Great success!

Onto the icing. Now this is the bit that I guess you have all been waiting for. I got a spatula at the ready and made my first attempt at putting a full layer of blue icing onto the cake. After seeing all of these TikTok videos and watching them put a crumb coat onto the cake every time, why did I think I would be able to get away with only putting one layer on it? I was wrong. The first layer did not go so well, and you could definitely see gaps of cake through it. Luckily, I plastered a thick, and I repeat… thick, layer of more blue icing on top of it and it worked wonders! After I had gone over it about 300 times to make sure that there were no holes, I was done, and if I say so myself, it looked pretty good. Voila! If only that was the end.

Onto the pink icing. I knew from the crackled sight of it that this was going to be a failure and I should have known better. Nonetheless, I filled up an icing bag with the pink gloop and started to pipe around the end of the top of the cake. This was a mistake. As soon as I had piped the first two swirls, it started to run. This was where I started to panic “fridge? Noooo. Ahhh. WHAT DO I DO? Help. Help me!!!!!” I screamed. Looking back at it, this was hilarious, but at the time, I did not see the funny side. After a few more seconds of panic, I decided that I was a strong independent woman and would carry on regardless. Once I had piped around the top of the cake, I realised that I definitely was panicking. It did not run too much and actually looked fine. Not like the ones on TikTok but still, fine.

At this point, I was over this activity and did not really want to carry on but, I was in it for the Athena team! To finish it off, I decided to mix both of the icing colours so that it had more chance of survival. This turned out to be, not really a purple but, a grey-ish blue. Rolling with it anyway, along the side I piped a draping line and around it, tiny polka dots. It did not look too bad. Using the same tiny nozzle, and practising on a bit of kitchen roll first, I wrote the word ‘Athena’ slightly off to the left. Deliberately, obviously. Just to balance out the wonky-ness, I placed a cute little heart under the ‘A’.

Overall, the cake did not turn out too badly and it also did not taste too bad. The actual cake was a tad dry but the raspberry jam really helped there. Seeing as I wasn’t following an actual TikTok recipe for the baking, I am going to ignore this. Plus, everyone that tried it said that it tasted good! I do not know if they were just being nice but, I’ll take it. The icing. I am not sure if I am ready to come to terms with. It 110% did not look like the one of the videos that I have seen on my TikTok but, it was not exactly a fail. In its own way, it was cute. A different kind of cute but still cute. I have to say though, that it is not as easy as it looks on TikTok. I will not be trying any of these TikTok trends again any time soon.

So, dear Channel 4, this is my application to join the next season of the Great British Bake-off. Watch out Paul Hollywood and Alison Hammond, I’m coming your way. Trust me, it will make great viewing figures.