Is there a better way to cut a cake?

Rachel Sugar

For the entirety of my life, I thought I understood how to cut a cake.
If it’s a sheet cake, well, the process is so obvious it’s embarrassing to talk about. But a round cake seemed equally uncomplicated: Simply cut it into wedges, like a pie chart or a pizza. Isn’t that what a cake slice is? Online, the answer is a resounding absolutely not. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube offer a never-ending stream of cake-cutting alternatives, designed to fight the dual problems of cake waste and butchery.
“We get loads of questions about how best to portion our cakes for a party”, wrote the baker Lily Jones below a TikTok tutorial demonstrating how to cut a six-inch cake into 32 mesmerisingly uniform “finger portions”. This process, which results in neat triangles approximately one-quarter of a standard slice, appears both byzantine and effortless.
“It’s very rare that I actually portion up a cake at a party”, Jones said — she’s a baker, not a caterer — but she maintains that the geometric technique is not only eminently doable, but, in fact, advisable. “It’s simple, it’s memorable, it’s quite neat”. Jones, who runs Lily Vanilli in London, is just one of many bakers and caterers who believe that small slices are, in fact, preferable. If your guests (stuffed with hors d’oeuvres and eyeing a towering confection) are balancing a plate in one hand and a beverage glass in the other, one thirty-second of a cake might be ideal.
If 32 slices seems too daunting, you might opt for the somewhat zanier approach proposed in a video from Lola’s Cupcakes in Britain. This method yields about two dozen interlocking wedges through a series of zigzag cuts.
Much like the cakes in these videos, the commentariat appeared split: Either it was pragmatic (“I’ve seen so much cake wasted at events”), or it was an affront (“If I get served 1/24th of an already small cake, I’m grabbing the whole thing and running”). “Tell me you’re broke without telling me you’re broke”, another viewer quipped.
“Everyone says give me a little bit — at least until they actually taste the cake”, said Anitria Odum, a Philadelphia-based baker who goes by the Philly Cake Lady on social media.
She advises customers to cut their cake along the centreline, then divide each half into even slabs, a technique popular with caterers but reassuringly approachable for nonprofessionals. (If the resulting slabs are still too big, just cut across again). “The ring method is too difficult to give to someone not in the industry”, Odum warned, which is how I learned about the ring method, another style employed by caterers: After removing a perfect circle from the centre of the cake, smaller slices are cut from the outer edge.
Social media cake hackers rarely suggest it, presumably for the same reason Odum doesn’t like it. “It takes up too much time”, she said, “and it’s messy”. Cake cutting anxiety might seem like a distinctly modern problem, but it has deep roots: In a 1906 letter to Nature, the British scientist and eugenicist Francis Galton proposed a new solution to the problem of cutting a small round cake for “two persons of moderate appetite”. One ought to cut a thick strip from the centre of the cake for the first servings, he explained, and then enlist a “common india-rubber band” to keep the remaining halves together; then, the process could be repeated in the opposite direction. More than a century later, the rediscovery of this method briefly took the internet by storm, but based on an informal survey of birthday parties I have been to, it made no impact on real life.
“People enjoy seeing things being deconstructed”, said Natasha Li Pickowicz, a Brooklyn-based pastry chef and the author of the cookbook “More Than Cake”. (She, too, favours slabs). It scratches a primal itch, watching a big thing being broken down into many small things.
“Are people going out and cutting their cakes this way?” Pickowicz said, referring to the more geometric methods. “No”. I would be the exception.
In pursuit of self-improvement, I obtained a 6-inch circular cake, chocolate with vanilla frosting. I had cut many cakes before, without concern for my performance, but that was before I learned how much I still had to learn.
I started cutting across the cake. It was so stressful I demanded my family vacate the kitchen. Halfway through cleaving mini wedges from the edges of each central slice, I felt the cake begin to wobble; I bisected the remaining diamonds and then, I cut those, too. It was so much cutting. I filled plate after plate with cake-covered fingers.
In the end, I had 32 slices — a vast majority of which were identifiably cake. They were not uniform, exactly, but in an artful heap, who could tell? “These would be great for a cocktail party!” I said. My husband pointed out that we have never had a cocktail party. This was true, but if we did, I was now prepared. — The New York Times