K-Trend: Vintage/Retro Cakes in Korea

Vintage/Retro Cakes 

It is a crime against humanity that some people (meaning some of us here at BAZZAAL) are lactose intolerant. Especially when we're so in love with this trend. 

We never thought we’d see an old food trend come back, let alone in Korea. Every piece of information we’ve gathered about mid-century food has been fascinating, but we never expected it to come back, even modernized. Little history lesson! The ’50s for the USA was a time where people were getting their first refrigerators, as this was the time where they were getting cheaper and mass-produced for the first time, and people were getting richer: Because of this people were experimenting with foods that they had never been able to combine before, and this is where you see what people now consider(ed?) “atrocious” looking ánd tasting combinations of food. (So.. much... gelatin) 

The same goes for cakes, of course, there were cakes before - just not as prevalent - and now suddenly cakes and cake mixes were all over the place. If you’re from the US or even the UK you might have seen those old illustrations or magazine cut-outs teaching people about how to pipe their cakes, these are probably from the 50’s! Even though the cakes weren’t as insane as you might imagine, there was a lot of colors and a lot of piping and other frills; we’ll let the images speak for themselves.

And now Korea is loving these! 

We believe we can pinpoint the start of this trend to be Dinga Cakehouse in the trendy neighborhood Yeonnamdong and Benny Cake in Hongdae! Both started, or became really popular, around 2018 and we remember they were quite unique at that time. But the trend has gained some traction, and now cakes - vintage style cakes - are everywhere! Ranging from huge and insanely over-decorated, heavy on primary colors, with frills and curls - to quite small, minimalistic and plain (and still so cute). 

Cakes obviously aren’t a traditional way of celebrating birthdays in Korea, but the love for celebratory cake has been growing and growing and growing. It used to be that you could see groups of friends get out a cake for someone’s birthday in a restaurant or cafe sometimes. Then cakes for Christmas and anniversaries started getting more popular too. Now we see people give super cute and custom(!) cakes for anything that can be celebrated. Especially since for the last year small cakes that fit in small takeaway boxes have been super popular. 

We personally love cake so seeing all these different cute designs pop up makes us very, very happy. The only thing that we're hoping for is different flavors! Although the designs are very cute and vary a lot, the flavors are usually limited to very basic flavors like vanilla, chocolate, and red velvet with very heavy cream cheese. we’ve had the pleasure of trying a couple of different birthday cakes this past half a year and some of them weren’t the best in flavor, but they weren’t not-good! Maybe we're too picky! 

We're excited to see where this cake trend goes and how it will change! It is absolutely fascinating to see how fast things change here, so maybe in another six months to a year, there will be no vintage cake left in sight! We’ll see.

 Want to see more cakes like these, search for the tags #생일케이크 #빈티지케이크 #주문케이크 #커스텀케이크 #케이크디자인 

Or follow @dingacakehouse @benny.cake @juujuucake @chyapchyap_cake @keki_house @_yammycake_ @seogwipean_official