This 2D cartoon cake trend makes its way to Baton Rouge

Home baker Victoria Hymel confesses that she can’t paint or draw. By the looks of her cakes and decorative cookies, one might think otherwise.

Being a baker was never in the cards for Hymel, though. She enjoyed making cakes for her kids, friends and family members. After leaving her corporate job, she took a chance and opened All Things Sweet By Victoria, a home bakery that specializes in custom cakes, decorated sugar cookies and more. 

“There’s never going to be a perfect timing for anything,” Hymel said of her switch to self-employment. “I have learned through all of this that if you’re not doing your passion, you’re going to be unhappy in a multitude of ways.” 

From textured frosting to vintage-inspired cakes, Hymel is excited about each order. More recently, she created a cartoon cake for 13-year-old Lily Barnes’ birthday party. 

The cartoon/comic cake trend gained popularity on social media around the end of 2022. Now, a quick search of the hashtag #cartooncake on Instagram reveals 134K posts, with different variations of cakes decorated to look like two-dimensional cartoons. 

Barnes said she found the idea while scrolling on Pinterest. She looked through a couple of ideas, but once she found this one, she was set. 

“We thought it was going to be really difficult,” said Wendi Berthelot, Barnes’ mother, of the cartoon cake request. “I was really skeptical about asking somebody to do that. But (Hymel) did a great job, and I was extremely impressed.” 

Barnes’ cake was a confetti cake with cream cheese frosting and pink, white and yellow accent colors. Berthelot said it was just as delicious as it was beautiful, and she has a picture of one of Barnes’ cousins trying to lick the cake. 

The key to a great cartoon cake is to have fun with it, Hymel said.

“Having fun and making the cake your own is what makes it perfect and unique,” she said. 

The black outlines, which can be done in black icing or fondant, make the cake look like a drawing. Hymel said that some of her cakes do feel like art to her, rather than just a normal cake. For example, for her mother’s birthday cake, which was a vintage-inspired butterfly cake, Hymel said she looked at her mother and asked, “Do we have to cut it? Can we not eat it?”