You Won't Believe How Long It Takes Robert Lucas To Make One Of His TikTok Cakes - Exclusive

You don't need to be a cake artist yourself to figure out that viral TikToker Robert Lucas spends a lot of time making his incredibly elaborate cakes. Creating a confection that looks like a Michael Jordan shoe, or erupts chocolate lava, certainly is going to be more time-intensive than, say, your typical from-a-boxed-mix cake. Inquiring minds want to know: from start to finish, exactly how long does it take for Lucas to concept, bake, decorate and then create a video of the whole process for his TikTok page, @thesweetimpact?

In an exclusive interview with Mashed, Lucas provided the rundown.  His process involves designing before and during the baking of the cake, he added. "I sketch it out," said Lucas, whose work just won him a spot on the prestigious 2022 #BlackTikTok Trailblazers list. "Then I start baking, trying to figure out what flavors to make the cake and also what color and what shape. Then I have to make the frosting again, what color and flavor of that as well, and then I start the design."

The amount of time one of his projects takes from beginning to end might surprise you.

"[For] just the design [and decorating part seen in the video], some of those cakes have taken nine or ten hours," he said. "That's not the baking, that's not frosting, that's just the design." If you thought Lucas was ambitious with cake designs that take up to ten hours, and have involved everything from an ode to "Space Jam" that included a basketball-shaped cake, to a cake that looks like a giant ice cream cone, hold onto your hats: the TikToker is just getting started. Lucas said he plans to up his game to include cakes that seem like they come from another dimension. "I want to push my designs even further, so I'm going to start leaning into doing more gravity-defying cakes, very structured cakes than what I have been doing, so I'm super excited for that," he said.

What is a gravity-defying cake? "They're structured cakes, but sometimes it can look like it's floating or sometimes it could look like it's falling over and it's like, 'How is that cake standing up there?'" Lucas explained. If you're curious how he's going to pull off this feat, don't worry: Lucas won't keep it a secret. "I'll show the process of how I actually did that," he shared.

You can follow Robert Lucas and his baking videos on TikTok.