by L.A. White
Everything is cake.
This simple sentence has been dominating social media for the past week, and frankly, it’s causing a bit of an existential uproar— for all the right reasons.
Sure, we’ve seen desserts that mimic real life before— everyone who’s ever had a baking show binge on Food Network can confirm that cooking is a form of art. But Buzzfeed’s Tasty tweeted this video (see below) last Wednesday that will leave even the most cultured cake critic shaking their head in disbelief.
Featuring cakes crafted by Turkish baker Tuba Geckil, this collection of hyperrealistic desserts has taken the internet by storm. Even I had to do a double take on some of these sugary sculptures— the cake toilet paper had me totally fooled!
Why has this become such a big deal? Well, it’s partly due to the way our brains view hyperrealistic art.
“I think we’re fascinated by the quality of the illusion — and there’s the strange dissonance brought on by perceiving things in two ways,” explains Rolf Nelson. He’s a professor of psychology at Wheaton College who studies visual perception.
”In the cake example, we have a conflict of perceiving it as a face or as a cake. Because the face looks so realistic, it takes us a second to reconcile these two things.”
As it turns out, once our minds adjust to the bizarreness of the illusion, watching these videos actually becomes kind of fun— until, of course, you remember that everything might actually be cake.
