What is The Cake Meme? And More Importantly, Am I Cake? - Esquire.com

Wow, what a terrible time to be alive. The truth feels subjective. Interpersonal contact is ill-advised. And now, the visual reality that we've all relied upon for so long has been upended. This week, thanks to a viral video, it seems that everything—literally everything—could be a cake. That sounds incredible on the surface, but it's the surface that is the problem. Cut into a Croc sandal? It's cake. Cut into a raw chicken breast? It's cake. For those who have salvaged their own sanity by remaining relatively offline, that may be a confusing string of sentences.

The national visual crisis started on July 8 when BuzzFeed's Twitter account for Tasty tweeted out a video originally posted on Instagram by Turkish baker, Tuba Geçkìl. Her bakery, Red Rose Cakes specializes in hyper-realistic cakes, and when we say hyper-realistic, we mean it's eerie how close these "cakes" resemble their real-life counterparts. Naturally, because we've been a collective captive audience quarantining for the past four months, the video has been watched upwards of 30 million times—that's just through the Tasty channel, too.

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The video features knives cutting into random objects that should have never been recreated as cake. Take for instance, the toilet paper. There is no alternate reality where I'm reaching for toilet paper and find myself pleasantly surprised to find cake. That might not be the case for everyone—we all worship at different bathhouses. But in the grand scheme of things, these cake-ified items—a bar of soap, some lotion, an entire potted aloe plant—bend the mind and all logical reasoning.

As the video became more popular, the internet spun out of control. People starting posting videos to social media, recreating the original video with non-cake objects. People, naturally, meme'd the video and suggested that anything you cut into is cake.

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And then that led to what I feel is probably a conversation deeper and more existential than we were prepared for: what is cake? Have we been living among random cake objects for years? Are we cake? Is cake, cake?

To pull back for a second, it's not as if this the first time someone has broken something open, only to find something else inside. That was the joy of chocolate Kinder Eggs, until they were banned in the U.S. for fear of being a choking hazard. The concept is the metaphorical premise for nearly every romantic comedy. More literally, one time during a particularly gruesome episode of Days of Our Lives, children hit a piñata and then a dead girl's body fell out. For reference, her body was not cake. TL;DR, we love finding surprises on the inside.

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What makes this meme so hilariously, darkly relevant right now, to put it bluntly, is that we're all half-crazy. The optical illusion of something so realistic being cut open, only to be revealed as cake, feels like an apt metaphor for the year we're living in. We've spent nearly a half a year hiding from a sprawling, invisible pandemic, limiting the interaction we have with one another, and there's something very "The Yellow Wallpaper" about it all. No, of course we're not cake, but also, maybe? Who knows? I think I miss my friends and family? I'm not crying. I'm laughing! At the meme!

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In recent days, as the meme has spread, everyone from NASCAR to Pokémon has gotten in on the joke. And unless isolation has really eaten away at your sense of reality, no one actually believes that they're cake (Seriously: Please do not cut yourself open. You're not cake). There's this notion that the world has been so irrevocably shaken up, twisted, and busted that in this logic-adjacent reality we're living in, you might just be able to cut open random, real objects and find a cake inside. I'm no meme-ologist. My mom wouldn't let me major in it. But when historians look back at our year, I hope they find this meme. I hope they retroactively worry about us, even just a little bit.

At the core, the whole internet cake moment is just a ~~cake~~ meme. They come and go as quickly as you can cut into an onion and find a block of red velvet. But of all the memes that have come out during this Very Serious Year, it's the odd nuance of the cake meme that speaks to our frazzled, glitched reality because as oddball as it is, there's some truth in the fact that in 2020, all you need is fondant and a little spin to turn one thing—be it cake or the truth—into something else entirely.

Justin Kirkland Justin Kirkland is a writer for Esquire, where he focuses on entertainment, television, and pop culture.

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