16 Great Cakes Based On Great Art

By Alex Schmidt on April 11, 2012

Not everybody bakes an ordinary cake, slaps something buttercream on it, and calls it a party. Some bakers say, "Hey, I need to blow some minds with how ear-choppingly good I am at painting with fondant." Hence, this tribute to Vincent van Gogh, one of art's greatest innovators in the field of classy iPhone home screen backgrounds.

The two keys to baking a successful great cake based on great art: make it look like a piece of art everyone will recognize immediately, and make it a kind of cake everyone likes (chocolate or funfetti, up to you).

This artful wedding cake request could have just been a little cake topper that looked like the farm couple from the painting, atop a regular three-tiered number any bakery can churn out. Instead, this baker subtly captured every key design element of American Gothic as a cake layer, right down to the (hopefully edible) pitchforks.

Pound cake, certainly the black sheep of the Cake Family, gets a delicious tribute here that's only revealed upon slicing. I like their stijl.

Oh sure, "splatter thing" is a dismissive term to call an innovative use of painting technique, but if you can figure out exactly which numbered Pollock painting this wedding cake is based on, let me know and I'll change it.

Yes, that hand-sculpted figure on the top is edible. This cake's so complicated and impressive it makes two years of painting a giant canvas one dot at a time look easy.

It's probably the most traditional-looking of these cakes, despite being modeled on an artwork modeled on a powerful semisynthetic hallucinogen…

…whereas this one's modeled on regular old sober dreaming (he claimed), and looks like no cake I've ever seen.