This Viral Cake Cutting Hack Changes Everything

Over the course of the last two weeks, a trend has spread from a video uploaded to TikTok by @theroseperiod on November 22 that reached over a million views. In the video, a quarantined family celebrates their daughter's birthday with a cake that they proceed to cut with wine glasses. In a rather satisfying manner to watch, they do this by taking turns to slowly press a wine glass into a cake. Filling the wine glasses was a piece of cake – well, pieces of cake – as the rims cut effortlessly into the dessert. They gave no explanation, but everyone raved.

"Genuins" was reportedly the way Duff Goldman, the "Ace of Cakes" and televised baking competition host, described the method to Bustle: "Each person can come in with their own cup and get their own serving — it's a nice communal experience where each person can interact with the cake and each other." By now, videos of wine glasses plunging into cakes have seeped from TikTok to Instagram, as seen in filmmaker Nancy Meyer's adoption of the hack. 

If seeing this inspired you to abandon your cake knife, Let's Eat Cake offers some tips. Mainly, use a deep, stemmed wine glass. With a stemless one, you will find your fist icing-deep in the remaining cake, thus ruining it for everyone else. Other tips include baking smaller cakes so they could be eaten in one attempt because the remains will probably be unappetizing and not pressing too hard or else you may end up with a fistful of shattered glass.

However, one person, or – to use the word Pedestrian TV describes them as – "hater," made the valid point that if you do scoop yourself a glass of cake, all the icing will be at the bottom. So unless you scoop deep at the outset, the final taste in your mouth will be that of sugar-heavy icing. If that bothers you not, all is hunky-dory. However, instead of baking a cake and dividing it with glasses, you could also make a desert within the glasses in the first place, as What's Cooking America demonstrates with a tiramisu recipe that incorporates a martini glass. That said, there is a visceral pleasure in watching the wine glass slip through the cake layers.