Why The Latest Viral Cake Trend Has The Internet Unglued

The cake is a lie. This once-popular meme, originating in the video game Portal, over time came to take on a new meaning over time. According to Know Your Meme, "The Cake Is a Lie" transmuted into an early 21st century online catchphrase meaning, "You are chasing after an empty, unattainable goal." It could, however, be used as a literal descriptor of the latest 2020 meme involving actual cakes that are meant to look like anything other than cake.

The lying cake trend started with a video of cakes made by the Turkish bakery Red Rose Cake & Tuba Geçki̇l shared by Tasty on Twitter that shows someone cutting into objects ranging from the odd (a bar of soap, a plant, a Croc) to the downright unappetizing (a roll of toilet paper). All of these turned out to be — you guessed it — cakes. Okay, this was all well and good, but then some other creative cake artists got into a "can you top this" battle, with YouTuber Natalie Sideserf tweeting disturbing pics where she's evidently performing brain surgery on cake versions of Willie Nelson and Jimin from BTS, along with an absolutely horrifying video where she dismembers an adorable bulldog puppy (cake). 

The Bake King amped up the gross-out factor even more when he tweeted a video where he sliced into something resembling his own tattooed arm (that was really a cake). Needless to say, the internet had some pretty strong reactions to these not-so-tasty cake videos.

While some commenters stuck to statements of how impressed they were at the cake makers' skill or how shocked or grossed out they felt at seeing heads, arms, innocent puppies, and footwear sliced into, others seemed to be trying to turn the whole "cake fake" thing into some kind of larger metaphor for the instability of life as we know it... or something. One person tweeted that the cake vids were making them paranoid, leading them to ponder the existential query, "What if I'm a cake and I don't even know it?" They received such dubious reassurances as, "We're all just sentient cake people with some weird filling known as blood, organs, and bones," and "Everything is pretty much cake if you want to think of it that way."

Things took a disturbing turn for another Twitter user, who proposed the following line of defense: "Your honor, in my client's defense, she thought her husband was a cake." They got even more twisted with another user who tweeted, "I have chained my roommate to the kitchen table. I will be cutting him open to see if he's a cake. He says he isn't, but that's exactly something a cake would say." Oh, and of course some even tried to make cake cutting political, with tweets like, "Cut the police budget, I promise it's cake."

Where will it all end? Only once we've accepted the darkest of truths, which is that deep inside, we're all actually devil's food.