360 Degrees of Feminine Competence: Surface Aesthetics, Expertise, and Authority Among Drip Cake Baker-Influencers

Abstract

This article explores the gendered expertise of neoliberal female influencers associated with a novel baking form, the "drip cake." It engages in a close historically and theoretically informed analysis of a selection of popular online bakers' content, majoring on their skill-sharing tutorials. Online images of drip cakes are distinctive and spectacular, and their creation is demanding. Yet they have become a mainstream standard of fashionable baking. First, the research shows how exclusive knowledge drawn from patisserie and modernist design has been co-opted by this mix of amateur and professional bakers and transformed and capitalised on through their non-boundaried community of practice into something they announce as definitively theirs. Second, digital cake and baking have been considered previously as part of a post-feminist retreat, reframing and aestheticizing traditional white, cis-gendered, female domesticity. However, in the case of the drip cake, a remarkable lack of reference to family or domestic life in the sample demands further analysis. Drip cake images exemplify aspects of post-feminist digital "food porn," but again elements of this are extended and defied by this phenomenon. Alternatively, cake images have been interpreted as expressions of mastery and competence. We build on these perspectives to explore the drip cake as a form of fashionable capital that stands for an ideal skin, body, and subjectivity in a striking performance of multiple aspects of cool, post-feminist perfection. We focus especially on the laboured and contradictory surface of the drip cake, finding little pleasure in eating or feeding, but instead, a celebration of rationality, cleanliness, and control; distinction produced through the creation of something formally perfect and fashionably current from the most unruly of substances.