What are the most popular cake design choices among today’s consumers, and which ones are on the rise? JackandBeyond.com recently did the analysis using Instagram.

Here are some of the key findings:

Made by drizzling a ganache or glaze over the top of the cake so it runs down the edges, drip cakes have clearly taken the world by storm – as there are 88,000 Google searches monthly.

Following behind in second place are naked cakes with a total of 2,803,434 hashtags to date. If you’re someone that likes a simple cake this is the trend for you, as the cake is filled with buttercream between the layers but has little to no frosting on its sides.

In third place is the marble cake with 581,067 Instagram hashtags. This design has upgraded over the years from a simple swirl of two different cake batters to marbled fondant and even dripped on marble effects. With 70,000 monthly Google searches, it seems that it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

Completing the top five are 3D cakes (481,558 Instagram hashtags) and ombre cake designs (260,432), showing us that we have moved away from the traditional designs.

Just making it into the top 20 are loaded cakes with 14,198 Instagram hashtags. This cake is definitely one for the sweet tooths as it often comes packed with doughnuts, macarons and chocolates on top.

Also among favorites are wafer paper cakes in 19th place (18,008 Instagram hashtags) and gravity-defying cakes in 18th (18,474). Both of these designs are great choices for people who want a show-stopping cake.

Which cake design trends are on the rise?

While currently scarce with only 41 posts, asymmetrical cakes are set to become bigger in the cake world, according to JackandBeyond.com. This design takes serious skills – with different sized cake tiers sitting on the edge of each other, one wrong move could see this cake toppling over.

From Baby Yoda to extravagant remakes of popular art pieces, sculptural cakes (197 hashtags) are also starting to have their moment on Instagram, as well as jelly island cakes (317). Both cakes require serious attention to detail as well as skill to pull off.

Methodology

JackandBeyond.com gathered a list of articles listing popular cake designs and used them to create a seed list to analyze. For each design, hashtags and all their variations were found on Instagram and the total number entered into an excel sheet.

The total number of hashtags were collated for each cake design and then ranked from highest to lowest to show the most shared on Instagram as well as the ones likely to rise over the next few months.

Data was collected on June 15, 2021