Last autumn, the British baker Sarah Hardy happened upon a painting by the late Colombian artist Fernando Botero, “Feliz Cumpleaños” (1971), depicting a cluttered dessert table piled with unevenly glazed éclairs, half-peeled fruit and, at the centre, a frilly cream-coloured layer cake topped with a grand dome. A few weeks later, Hardy, of the cult London cake studio Hebe Konditori, brought the painted confection to life, making a hazelnut, dulce de leche and vanilla base and lining the upper tiers with white chocolate buttercream and lemon curd. Once she shaped the cake using a pastry knife, she clad the entire tower with sheets of pink fondant, airbrushed electric yellow and cyan for a seamless matt effect. “I like when it doesn’t look 100 percent edible,” she said.

Fondant, also known as sugar paste or plastic icing, the cake decor most often associated with traditional weddings, may seem anachronistic in the realm of avant-garde baking. Contemporary cake trends favour a more organic aesthetic, layered with impressionistic overpiping or sprouting floral outgrowths. But a few bakers and pastry chefs are reclaiming the method, precisely for its retro, mass-market aesthetic. “We’re saturated with wobbly cakes or crazy flowers that aren’t even edible shoved on top of cake,” says the Brooklyn-based food designer Suea. “A masterpiece made of fondant makes you think, ‘Let’s just take it back to the classics.’ ”

In medieval Europe, fondant existed in the form of decorative filigreed sugar-paste follies. Later, during the Age of Enlightenment, bakers began to decorate cakes like petits fours with a silvery poured fondant glaze that hardened in the oven. Contemporary rolled fondant originated in the early 20th century as a trick of culinary engineering, made by mixing boiled sugar with softening and stabilising additives, typically glucose syrup, gelatin and glycerin. Gentler and more forgiving than royal icing, the brittle gloss associated with conventional British cake stylings, fondant was commercialised in the early 1960s as a premade ready-to-roll frosting, sold alongside instant custard mixes and cake batter emulsifiers.

Flattened out from a pliable brick, the icing resembles pie dough as it’s held aloft before being draped, in one fraught move, over a bare cake. The next step is to buff the icing until it’s as smooth and manicured as possible: free from wrinkles, air bubbles and blurred edges. At once clingy and protective, fondant prolongs the lifespan of a cake, turning it into what the British cultural historian Nicola Humble has called the type of food that “gets to sit around being looked at for quite a long time”.

On its own, fondant lacks texture and colour, making it, Hardy says, “the perfect backdrop”. Food-safe dyes adhere to it easily, and are in fact amplified by the icing’s bright white undertones from the powdered sugar. (In contrast, buttercream has a dulling effect.) Some bakers knead colour directly into it, as in the case of a streaky indigo-and-red marbled twist on the Sicilian ricotta-based cassata made by the Parisian food artist Andrea Sham. You can also paint directly on the icing with a watercolour brush or spray colour from an edible-ink pen, like the hazy, candy-hued stars and graffiti-style lettering stencilled onto Suea’s white layer cakes by her boyfriend, the skater and artist Trung Nguyen.

But fondant has one well-known downside: “It tastes overly sweet and like chalk,” says Suea, who tells her clients not to eat it. Other bakers have turned instead to fondant substitutes; Sham, for example, covers her Swedish princess cakes with a sheet of earth-toned almond paste finished with a scalloped black buttercream trim. The baker Mina Park, who owns the Brooklyn cake shop 99, approximates fondant with mochi. At a party for the designer Sandy Liang held on Manhattan’s Lower East Side this past northern autumn, she presented pink snowball mochis that resembled jewellery cushions, each one bearing a milk white strawberry. “These days I’m more interested in restraint,” says Park.

But sometimes only the original will do — the campier, the better. Last July, Lucy Chadwick, the British director of the contemporary art gallery Champ Lacombe in Biarritz, France, bought a cake on the spur of the moment at a local bakery to accompany the opening of her latest exhibition, a group show about the digital-age baroque. The confection was “brilliant in its opulent absurdity”, says Chadwick, who picked the cake — a stack of lemon sponge disks veneered in cheetah-print fondant — to echo the show’s themes of contemporary excess and kitsch. On display the next day in its gilt-backed cardboard box, alongside a surreal portrait by John Waters and a fuzzy purple faux-fur canvas, it looked almost like an uncanny art object of its own

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It is 6pm and 26 degrees. On a narrow street on the outskirts of the city centre, in front of an open doorway, half a dozen tables are sprinkled across the footpath, each occupied by two or three fashionably dressed young people drinking butterscotch-coloured wine and picking at plates of tarte au comté. Inside, a chandelier casts a Sunkist glow over the compact kitchen and two-storey dining room.

Despite appearances, this intimate venue, Caravin, isn’t in the French capital’s 11th Arrondissement. Rather, it’s a new-ish Parisian restaurant and wine bar in Sydney’s Potts Point. Caravin’s owners, Greg Bampton and Phil Stenvall, say the Ward Avenue property’s structure and location was influential in deciding the style of cuisine but, serendipitous origins aside, Caravin’s existence (and perennially crowded tables) is part of a surge of French-inspired eateries and drinking holes popping up across Australia.

“There is definitely an element of escapism at play,” Bampton says of the trend. “I still see Sydney having a pub-orientated drinking culture, but French or Parisian venues offer guests the opportunity to exist outside of their everyday — especially if they couldn’t swing a trip to Europe that year, and even if just for a few hours.”

French cuisine’s versatility might also have something to do with it being “back in fashion”, posits the Australian-based French chef, author and television presenter Gabriel Gaté. “In an Italian restaurant, there might be three or four fresh pastas and the tiramisu,” Gaté says. “With a French restaurant, we are not always sure what it’s going to be because I think there’s a little bit more of a variety — depending on where the chefs come from or their experience.”

For Gaté, cuisine is, in one sense, a language. “The chef will have their own interpretation of dishes, and with their own twist,” he says.

Fellow culinary icon Stephanie Alexander is an Australian cook, restaurateur, food writer and frequent traveller to the European gastronomic capital. Why does she believe Australians can’t get enough of French dining? In short, it’s the singular correctness.

“In French, you talk about something being ‘correct’,” says Alexander. “There’s an atmosphere, there’s a warmth, there’s an attention to what they see as important. The tables will look beautiful, there will be flowers somewhere. There will be somebody smiling at you. There will be a sense that you are expected to have a totally beautiful, relaxing evening. It is just an expectation that you’re going to have a good time. And so you do.”

Perhaps the answer to this riddle will reveal itself by going straight to the source: Paris’s 11th Arrondissement. On Rue Saint-Maur sits Camille Fourmont’s petite La Buvette, a one-woman wine bar that specialises in natural and obscure drops and simple plates of food. According to Fourmont, what makes the venue special is its sense of personal intimacy. “Light globes, furniture, silverware were my very own belongings and choices, just like I would have opened an extension of my living room,” she says.

“It is a very local-friends-neighbourhood place,” Fourmont continues, with La Buvette creating an “attractive mood” for diners, as if they were “just visiting and stopping by”.

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The Los Angeles-based baker Michelle Boulos can still picture the sheet cakes she ate as a child: slathered with bright white frosting, decorated with tiny plastic balloons. But the confections she makes and sells via her Instagram account No Good Cakes are something else entirely. On one recent creation, frills of buttercream surrounded an acid green ombré surface inspired by a chemical spill. On another, foraged blooms sprouted from bronze-coloured barnacles, some of them embedded with tiny light bulbs. Boulos, 34, started baking the fantastical cakes out of her home in 2022 after making one for a wedding. “I got bitten by the sheet cake bug,” she says. “It can be so versatile but also really complex.”

Sheet cakes, which can be made in the giant 66-by-46-centimetre pans used in commercial kitchens, or in half- or quarter-sheets at home, have long been viewed as easy-lift treats meant to feed the masses — something you pick up at the supermarket en route to your seven-year-old’s birthday party. But today, more bakers and pastry chefs are embracing their simple geometry as the ideal stage for elaborate, unexpected designs. This past winter, Lucie Franc de Ferriere, the 28-year-old owner of the Manhattan bakery From Lucie, paved one with basil buttercream and topped it with chamomile-ringed pools of strawberry sumac jam for an event at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, jewellery shop Catbird. Around the same time in Los Angeles, Rose Wilde, 39, the owner of Red Bread, made an olive oil version layered with peaches and satsuma-Nardello pepper buttercream for a Glossier product launch party. Compared to the multitiered cakes that have been de rigueur at big events for decades, the humble sheet is “less whimsical, so you have to be a bit more creative about how you’re going to infuse your style into it”, says Julie Saha, a 26-year-old baker and artist in Brooklyn who sells her work via her website, juliemadeyoudinner.com. Her rococo cakes meld orderly, ornate piping with ebulliently messy bunches of exotic fruits and colourful foliage. 

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of the sheet cake as we know it but, by the late 1800s, cakes were already being baked in the shallow pans used to catch meat drippings. According to Anne Byrn, the author of “American Cake” (2016), the 33-by-23-centimetre rectangular pans that home bakers often use today grew popular in the 1950s, their ascent coinciding with a boom in cake mixes scaled to that size. The current sheet cake trend kicked off alongside the rise of internet-based microbakeries, some of which were run from home kitchens. The shape makes portioning and transporting easier, says Noelle Blizzard, 34, who started her Philadelphia bakery, New June, from her home during the pandemic. Originally, Blizzard, a former marketing manager at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, gravitated towards fresh flowers and swooshy frosting for a rustic and organic look. Now she’s more into Victorian-style garlands and ruffles. The oversized expanse offers “so much room to showcase all of the different piping styles and throw some colour into it”, she says. Sheet cakes “turned out to be this amazing creative outlet.”

But the appeal of the sheet doesn’t end with its ability to function as a “beautiful, flat blank canvas”, says Jessamie Holmes, 25, the Melbourne-based baker and artist who sells her work via her Instagram account Thy Caketh. There’s also a nostalgic exuberance to the cake, which has always been made expressly for the sort of big gatherings and celebrations the world was deprived of during the initial years of the pandemic. For a picnic in the park in 2022, Holmes adapted a Sicilian cassata — traditionally round and filled with ricotta and chocolate — into a low rectangle bejewelled with sugared dried fruit and surrounded by candles. Since then, the form has become her favourite. Unlike towering, tiered centrepieces “intended to be the backdrop of a big wedding”, she says, sheet cakes are designed to be devoured with ease. “Anyone,” she adds, “can cut one.”

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A cloud captive on a plate, a meringue is a shape-shifter, an essential component of any pastry chef’s repertoire: it can be eaten nearly raw, a lightly bronzed heap of wobbly snow atop a glossy lemon pie, or baked into crunchy smithereens. Sometimes it’s barely detectable, folded into lush buttercream frosting or hidden in the delicate shell of a macaron. Its most recent main character moment was arguably the 1980s, when baked alaska and Pavlova dominated dessert plates.

Now, a new generation of pastry chefs and food artists are highlighting meringue in modern takes on sculptural sweets. Among them are the Brooklyn-based artist and chef Jen Monroe, who has made sprawling 0.5-square-metre rose water Pavlovas with candied rhubarb bows and pulled-sugar spires for her project Bad Taste; the Paris-based baker Andrea Sham, who paints meringue discs with powdered activated charcoal and spirulina to create desserts that shimmer like sea foam; the Brooklyn-based baker Samantha Raye, who documents her frilly, poodle-shaped meringue cookies on her Instagram account, @thegeminibake; and Paris Starn, a food artist, also based in New York, who encases pistachio chiffon cake layered with strawberry compote and pastry cream in frothy heaps of pastel meringue cookies and porcelainlike meringue bows.

The meringue’s exact origins are a matter of debate. Its creation is commonly attributed to a chef named Gasparini in the Swiss town of Meiringen around 1720, but a recipe for “meringues”, described roughly as “small works of sugar both very easy and very pretty”, had already been published in a 1692 cookbook by the industrious French chef François Massialot, who is also credited as the inventor of the crème brûlée. Undeniably, though, meringue is a miracle of chemistry, which one performs by agitating egg whites (or aquafaba, for a vegan version) and sugar into stiff peaks. Heated over a double boiler, it emerges stable and fluffy, the way the Swiss prepare it; beat in molten sugar syrup and you have the Italian preparation: sturdier, plusher and even more satiny.

Long before wire whisks and KitchenAids were invented, pastry cooks for wealthy Europeans and Americans relied on bundles of straw or branches to whip up meringue for visually impressive desserts like macarons and île flottante. “I think a lot about how labour-intensive it must have been when people started making baked alaska back in the 1860s, and how opulent it must have been to enjoy it, because it’s such a process,” says the pastry chef Caroline Schiff, whose nostalgic dessert menu at the Victorian-era Brooklyn oyster and chophouse Gage & Tollner is crowned with a baked alaska. The toasted bouffant of Swiss meringue — made to order and enrobing layers of mint, dark chocolate and Amarena cherry ice cream — is the most popular sweet on the menu, outselling chèvre cheesecakes and chocolate tortes with ease.

But meringue doesn’t always tempt a generation raised on the brittle, chalky chocolate available at grocery stores. “It’s something I’ve been trying to sell clients on, because I love working with it so much, and they never bite,” says Starn. “I’m making things for Instagram in the hope that others will.” She reversed her own negative opinion of the dessert on a 2019 trip to Kazakhstan, where she was entranced by cookies that featured waves of crisp meringue on a biscuit base. “There was something about the cookie with another cookie on top of it as decoration that blew my mind,” she says. “Because meringue is both chewy and crunchy, it can provide nuance to a dish that wouldn’t otherwise have it.”

While maximalist cakes garnished with purely ornamental botanicals like thistles and orchids have recently found viral fame online, bakers who prefer working with edible toppings are embracing meringue’s potential as a striking and hardy decoration with a texture all its own. Julia Aden, who worked at the renowned London bakery Violet Cakes before launching Süss Cake Studio, wraps her signature tiered cakes with rippling waves of leaflike meringue cookies. And in Los Angeles, the visual artist Rosalee Bernabe shapes meringue into puffy clouds and cheery toadstools to adorn cakes for Chariot, which she describes as her “psychic pastry project”. 

“I love the contrast that a baked meringue has: shattery on the outside and pillowy on the inside,” says Monroe. Her dramatic Pavlovas are pure celebration food, whether piled high with sweet basil cream and chunky pink chains made from sugar or topped with what Monroe calls a “Creamsicle palette” of Alphonso mango curd and candied golden kiwis. Each bite is a study in textural juxtaposition, and the dessert as a whole is a visual showstopper. “People lose their minds when you bring out a six-foot [1.8-metre] Pavlova,” says Monroe. “It’s an opportunity to be sculptural and kitschy, a bit of Victorian silliness that I think speaks to this post-Marie Antoinette dessert moment we’re having.”

But meringue’s pleasures aren’t limited to aesthetic fantasy: it allows restaurants to use up extra egg whites left over from making yolky fresh pasta, aioli or custard-based ice creams. “It’s this beautiful canvas that’s also affordable for chefs,” says Schiff, noting that rising food costs and inflation are giving restaurants more reason to make the most of every ingredient. Fully baked for a Pavlova or Eton mess, meringue keeps in an airtight container for days, enabling easy assembly for kitchens without full-time pastry chefs. And as more home bakers gravitate towards an aesthetic that prioritises messy exuberance over careful piping, meringue-based dishes provide a dessert option that delights without demanding perfection. “It’s a lower-stakes, higher-chaos dessert,” says Monroe. “I’ve been slightly drunk assembling a Pavlova, and it went great. You can’t do that with a cake.” 

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