Proof that cakes can be both delicious and deeply directional.
Melbourne-based cake maker Gabi of G.CAKES is redefining the modern celebration cake through a distinctly style-led lens. Known for her sculptural forms, unexpected textures and beautifully curated visual world, her cakes feel as considered as an editorial shoot while remaining deeply rooted in flavour and experience. Challenging the conventions of traditional wedding and event cakes, Gabi approaches each creation as both a design object and a moment of celebration, blending artistry, produce and personality in a way that feels fresh, contemporary and entirely her own. With a style that draws as much from design, fashion, art and culture as it does from patisserie, G.CAKES is quickly becoming one of the most exciting names reshaping the conversation around modern cakes and celebration styling.
Your cakes feel less like traditional celebration cakes and more like edible design objects. Was there a particular moment where you consciously decided to challenge the conventional wedding cake mould?
I began my cake journey making quite traditional, smooth-edged cakes whose design centred around the floral decorations that topped them. While I enjoyed making these cakes, I felt quite limited working within this traditional framework, as the designs were confined to what flowers were available, and often the budget was blown wide open by sourcing floral arrangements that were interesting enough to allow for the experimentation and intrigue that I was trying to create. Instead of cakes being a creative outlet, I found myself replicating cakes that I’d seen a hundred times before, and quickly became creatively frustrated. Online, I was seeing a movement towards cakes that broke away from these restraints; cakes that questioned traditional form, flavour and texture and which made the cake itself into a piece of art, rather than a mere carrier for florals. I started experimenting with form, creating wonky and uneven structures that I would make through stacking the cake and carving its sides. I reframed the cake’s surface to treat it like a textile, creating texture, pattern and movement through the unconventional use of piping tips and palette knives. Cake making suddenly became an exercise in sculptural and textural experimentation, and I found a distinct satisfaction in making cakes into edible art forms that allowed people to feel intrigue, joy and wonder.
One of the things we love most about your brand is not just the cakes themselves, but the entire visual world around them. The styling, photography and presentation on Instagram feel incredibly curated and directional. How important is the visual storytelling side of the business to you, and where do you draw inspiration from aesthetically?
Telling a story through the photos I take, the captions I write and the music that I use to overlay my posts is extremely important to me. Cakes are a very fleeting art form; so many hours of meticulous work goes into making them, and in the end they are eaten and destroyed. Capturing a cake is like capturing a moment in time, a fragment of celebration and unspoken feeling that I feel an obligation to preserve. I like to experiment with photography and writing the same way I like to experiment with cake design. I play with light and shadow, cropping and capturing finer details to convey the cake’s complexity. I also love the juxtaposition of soft buttercreams and florals against the harshness of uneven concrete. This leads to an overall online presence which I hope draws people in and reflects a deeper story of culture and connection that each one of my cakes is attempting to convey.
Your work feels very trend-aware, yet never trend-driven. In many ways, it feels like you are setting the mood rather than following it. How do you stay creatively ahead of the curve without losing your own point of view?
When I’m looking at trends appearing across the wedding and cake industries, I try to look at the broader picture of what the trends are conveying. Currently, we’re seeing a movement towards texturally imperfect, bold and personality-driven cake styles that reject the rigidity of traditional cake design. I think this reflects a collective craving for joyfulness and whimsy that provides a relief from the bleakness of our current political and economic environment. But I also think that an increase in the use of AI technologies and the need to please pre-existing algorithms has led to a cultural fatigue that has people desperate for newness, personalisation and human connection. People seem hungry for products that are unlike things they’re repeatedly seeing in their feeds, so we’re seeing a rise in the consumption of authentic design forms that transform mundanity into something which captivates and excites. I design my cakes within this framework – how do you take something traditional and that we’ve all seen before, and transform it into something eye-catching, joy-sparking, and maybe even slightly confusing? This creativity is my primary objective in my cake making. If I don’t find my designs interesting, exciting or aesthetically beautiful, how could I expect anyone else to? I closely follow a lot of cake artists that are breaking away from traditional molds and experimenting with form and texture. Vege Mamma (@vegemammma) Queremos Pastel (@__queremospastel) and my fellow Melbourne cake artists I Made a Cake (@imade_a_cake), Lil Choux Choux (@lil_choux_choux___) and Holy Sugar (@holysugar__) are among my biggest inspirations.
We’d love to know more about your approach to flavour and produce. How do you source ingredients, and are there certain flavours, textures or seasonal elements you find yourself continually drawn back to?
Creating a cake that tastes good is equally as important to me as creating a cake that looks good. It shatters me when cake goes uneaten, so I spend a lot of time curating flavour combinations and ensuring that my cakes are interesting from a visual, textural and flavour perspective. To do this, I aim to achieve balance with sweet, salty and acidic elements, while also ensuring an ideal ratio between the cake crumb, the creamy elements and the crunchy textures. Cakes contain a lot of sugar, so I make sure to counterbalance this with saltiness in a buttercream, or tanginess in a citrus curd, or earthy bitterness in a toasted honey ganache. All of my flavours are curated with the idea that a cake should never be too rich or too sweet; it should be luscious, intriguing, lip-smacking, and make people ask if there’s enough for seconds.
Couples are becoming far more fashion- and design-conscious when it comes to weddings. Have you noticed people approaching cakes differently in recent years, perhaps treating them more as part of the overall creative direction rather than simply a dessert?
There is definitely a movement towards cakes becoming part of the overall creative direction of a wedding, and I think this is a fantastic way to look at wedding cakes. Weddings are drenched in tradition, and some couples struggle to pull themselves away from a ‘box ticking’ style of wedding planning, choosing things because they believe it’s required, rather than thinking about what they really want. I’ve noticed couples becoming more intentional about the mood of the event they’re trying to create, sourcing vendors that have unique, style-led and often unexpected design perspectives that result in weddings that are both design-focussed and deeply personal.
Your cakes have a beautiful balance of restraint and playfulness. When beginning a wedding cake concept, what usually comes first for you: flavour, colour, texture, shape, mood, or something else entirely?
When I start to design a wedding cake, I like to know what the wedding venue looks like, and the mood of the wedding that the couple are trying to create. Whether the wedding is taking place in a historic building or a garden or a restaurant will have a large bearing on the design process, determining if the wedding demands a cake with clean and sophisticated lines, bursting florals, or tasteful chaos. From here, I can tailor a design based on the mood of the wedding and the couple’s preferences.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions couples have about wedding cake budgets? Are there particular elements that significantly impact pricing that people may not initially consider?
There are a lot of misconceptions about how much cakes should cost. There is an enormous amount of work that goes into making a bespoke cake. Each cake is designed from scratch, and a lot of time and expertise goes into sourcing ingredients, engineering a cake to ensure it is structurally sound, making each individual element and, finally, decorating. A lot of the bespoke cake makers I’m seeing now are largely independent, self-run creatives who operate with entirely in-house production, with a single person responsible for sourcing ingredients, design, creation, accounting and business development. When you buy a custom cake, you’re not just paying for a piece of food, you’re paying for a work of art from an independent operator, and this needs to be kept in mind when you’re prioritising where to put your wedding budget. My top tip is to canvas your budget with your cake maker first, so they can work with you to create a cake that you love and that aligns with your financial expectations.
For couples planning their wedding cake, what do you think are the most important things to think about early on? Timing, guest numbers, styling direction, venue logistics or budget?
In my view, it’s most important to think about how the cake fits into and adds to the event. A lot of people are concerned about having a cake that’s big enough to feed their guests, but to me this is a secondary concern – often cake is served at the end of the night when people are busy dancing and drinking and cake might not be what they’re after. What matters more is the role you want your cake to play on the day; do you want a dramatic centrepiece, a sculptural cake that serves as an artistic installation, a fun cake to stick a celebratory sparkler in, a long cake that makes for a beautiful cutting shot. Cakes are not a cheap addition to a wedding, so it’s important to make sure you curate a cake that you love, that tastes good and that adds to the event, rather than being a forgotten addition to the menu.
If you could create a cake inspired entirely by a fashion house, artist, film or cultural moment, with absolutely no commercial limitations, what would it look and taste like?
For a long time I’ve admired Schiaparelli’s sculptural designs and the way they blend surrealism, sculpture and subversive design philosophies to create bold pieces of wearable art. I saw another one of my favourite cake artists, Yip.Studio (@yip.studio_), design a Schiaparelli-inspired cake, which was an enormous, celestial mound with a surreal and disproportionate face that was covered in a gold finish. It is one of the most entrancing cakes I’ve ever seen, and perfectly reflective of Schiaparelli’s sculptural design philosophy which challenges traditional forms. A lot of Schiaparelli’s designs feature stark contrasts, blacks punctuated with bold metallics or oversized animal textures, and a lot of their design inspiration appears to be drawn from elements of nature (either animals, water or the solar system). I would design a cake that featured bold metallics, that was a lopsided sculpture and which featured dark, broody flavours, like chocolate, blackberry and toasted honey.
Finally, what do you hope people feel when they see one of your cakes for the first time? Awe, curiosity, hunger, confusion, delight, or perhaps all of the above?
I hope people feel joy when they see my cakes. My favourite moment is when people come to collect their cake, and they look in the box and their faces fill with joy and wonder. I know that modern life comes with pressures and uncertainty and thoughts that can be all-consuming, so being able to remove people from this even briefly feels like a big success. It’s a joy to be involved in people’s big life moments, even in the smallest of ways, and contributing to people’s warmest memories through the creation of cakes will never be something that I grow tired of.
ABOVE Gabi
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