Top Cake Trends for 2023 - What's Hot and What's Not

Archive · 2023 Forecast

Top Cake Trends for 2023: What We Thought Was Hot — And Not

Archive note: This forecast was written at the end of 2022 for 2023. Prices, energy-cost references, retailer ranges, celebrity examples and demand claims in the original article belonged to that moment and should not be read as current facts. This edited archive keeps Reshmi’s original trend calls while removing stale statistics and claims that were not adequately sourced.

The useful thing about an old trend list is not pretending we predicted everything correctly. It is seeing what a working bakery thought customers would care about next.

What we thought would be hot in 2023

1. Fake Bakes

During the cost-of-living squeeze, decorating ready-made supermarket cakes became an entertaining way to create a bigger visual result without baking every component from scratch. Our Fake Bakes archive preserves the series and its original retailer snapshots.

2. Oil-based sponge

We had already moved our Hero Sponge towards oil before this forecast. We liked the tenderness and production consistency, particularly because the formula does not depend on creaming butter and sugar. That was a bakery choice, not proof that every oil sponge is better than every butter cake.

3. Luxury Cakescapes

Our view was that large, highly decorated multi-cake installations could sit in a different spending category from ordinary celebration cakes. The prediction came from our own enquiry pattern rather than a claim about every household or the whole luxury market.

4. More inclusive home-baking recipes

We were seeing more interest in recipes designed around particular dietary requirements. That remains relevant to home baking, but it should not be confused with the current Anges de Sucre physical cake offer: our bakery does not sell vegan or gluten-free cakes, and shared-kitchen cross-contact matters.

5. Comic cakes

Graphic black piping designed to make a real cake look illustrated was a very social-media-friendly style and a welcome contrast to more ornate piping trends.

6. Hazelnut / Kinder-style flavours

Sweet hazelnut-chocolate combinations were already extremely familiar to customers. We expected that familiarity to keep working in celebration cakes and Fake Bakes, without making claims about any retailer’s current stock or sales.

What we thought was cooling

Cupcakes: our opinion was that the dedicated cupcake boom had matured, even though cupcakes obviously did not disappear.

Standalone macarons: Anges de Sucre had begun with macarons, but by this point we were using them more often as cake decoration than as boxed hero products.

Cronuts: the frenzy around the original hybrid had clearly subsided from its peak.

Edible-flower decoration: Reshmi was thoroughly bored of petals scattered over cakes. That was an aesthetic opinion, not evidence that flowers had vanished from the market.

Fresh fruit and flower cakes: again, this was a prediction shaped by cost and our own design preferences, not a universal rule about what customers would buy.

Some of these calls aged better than others. That is exactly why the archive is useful.