When I first came across a photo of a purple cake with the caption “I don’t need solutions, I just want to complain,” I thought of a message in a bottle thrown into the ocean that finally found its recipient in me. A bit like daily notifications from colleagues or graffiti that dazzles you on the streets, land Ugly Cakes fill the Instagram feed with their disarming sincerity, pastel colors and cream curls. Social profile with 31k followers Veronica Boienti he is the most influential person on the Italian scene, and while his creator is taking things a step further, his cakes help set the trend for ugly cakes.

Which are not ugly, but the definition allows immerse yourself in an ironic world of imperfection that combines taste with aesthetics. Gone are the days of food porn, when videos of greedy sweets and overstuffed creams blocked the internet and the competition was to take a picture of the stuffed one. The days of Buddy Valastro and his programs are far away too cake boss, with these thousand-story sugar paste creations, highly decorated but tasteless. 2022 marked photogenic but not elitist sweets conceived as joke captions, evolving cake design high confectionery and hypercommerce in a new paradigm. To define the philosophy of her desserts, Veronica Boienti likes to quote Miuccia Prada, her guiding spirit: “The ugly is attractive, the ugly is exciting. For me, the search for the ugly is more interesting than the bourgeois idea of ​​beauty. And why? Why? the ugly is the human.”

Leave aside the aesthetics in Cédric Grolet, but keep the taste, add some personalization to taste. Through the Ugly Cakes profile, Veronica Boyenti collects requests from her followers and creates special cakes. depending on the requests that can be made by choosing the ingredients among the many delicious offers on the official website of the Arese small laboratory. The bases range from carrot cake to more classic vanilla, toppings can be tasted with salted caramel flavor to diplomatic cream, fresh fruit and toppings can be added as desired, and finally, the inscription – if it is sincere and says something about us. . No shortage of vegan lactose-free options or the opportunity to order cakes for ceremonies and special events. To learn more about ugly cakes, we need to get to know Veronica Boyenti.

If you were a bad cake, what would you be?

A self-deprecating cake in pastel colors, almost certainly warm, with the words: “GO ME I VIVO LA MALE”. Maybe I do it for my birthday.

Where does the passion for confectionery come from? Did you do other work before Ugly Cakes came out?

A passion for baking was born when I was 6 years old and I stole raw shortbread dough from my aunt while she was baking pies. At the age of 17, I spent a year in America on an exchange, it seems like a paradox, but there I attended my first culinary master class and I was very sure that when I returned, I would start baking colorful cupcakes, they were not yet known in Italy.

Needless to say, when I got home, I didn’t even cook it by mistake. A few years later I graduated. After graduating from university and getting a master’s degree in communications and media, I worked in an agency in Milan. In the same period, she attended confectioner courses on weekends; I decided to go down this path at the beginning of 2020 and here I am.

You call your cakes ugly, but by what standard? They look super instagrammable to me

What is usually called “ugly”, I consider something that is different from the canons of beauty that society has built over the years. The ugly, as I understand it, is true beauty, imperfect perfection. It is not a photo for Instagram that makes a cake beautiful, but the process, the essence, the emotions that it evokes in those who order it and those who receive it. They are made to measure. In my cakes, I’m looking for the simplicity of homemade, grandma’s cakes, not symmetry and aesthetic precision.

On the Ugly Cakes website, you write that your sweets are a “form of protest” compared to what?

I wish my desserts were a vehicle for that message: take yourself less seriously. Let’s face it, sweets should be destroyed with bites, not contemplation. People need to be lived, not judged. Every cake I create has a part of the customer who orders it, the phrases are often irreverent and ironic, sometimes over the top. This does not make my clients dishonest people, but real people. it sweet to protest against appearance, in sweets, as well as in people.

What was the most difficult but most delicious cake you have ever made?

To date, the cake that has put me the most to the test has been the cake for illustrator Quasirosso, a reproduction of the Fairy Fauna cake in sleeping Beauty. The other was a cake inspired by the Balmain jacket worn by Lil Nas X at the 2022 Grammy Awards. Despite the challenges, each cake is a lot of fun to make.