Is It Cake? is an insult to the fine art of making realistic cakes

Slate

"The cakes are always impressive, but the show doesn’t seem that interested in the actual craft of what the bakers are doing," says Cleo Levin of the Netflix reality sensation. "They get eight hours to make their creations, and the crew must get plenty of footage of the bakers explaining their process, but it’s almost as if the editors are too impatient to let them get into the details. Someone will say, 'I need this to look the right color tan,” or, “This material is supposed to look like fabric,' before the camera cuts to a quip from host Mikey Day, and we lose any details about the process. If you actually search for realistic cake videos posted by actual bakers themselves (as opposed to watching the viral posts from aggregators), you’ll see that making these cakes is more about sculpting and painting fondant or modeling chocolate than it is actual baking. The cake part really only forms the base, and most of the creation is built on top of it. But you’d have no idea this was the case from watching Is It Cake?. It’s likely that part of why these details are mostly left out is to preserve the surprise, so that viewers can also guess which is cake along with the judges. But it’s also clear that the appeal of this show isn’t meant to be about creation, but results."