In a cramped Manhattan apartment kitchen, Chelsey White painstakingly bakes, assembles, frosts and decorates an elaborate mermaid-themed cake. The entire four-hour process is videotaped, then edited down to a few brisk minutes and shared on social media. Its purpose served, the three-tiered, picture-perfect cake is chopped up and jammed into a Tupperware container. White brings all her leftovers to the office. She hates wasting cake.
With over a quarter-million followers and videos that regularly generate hundreds of thousands of views, White is an Instagram celebrity. She used to sell cakes to her fans, but now she makes money selling the concept of cake, in conjunction with such partners as the Food Network and AwesomenessTV.
"I'm getting way more money from content creation than I was from cakes," said the 26-year-old. She declined to get into the details of her contracts, but said she now earns more than she did when she was accepting eight cake orders a week, at about $100 each.
Instagram's baking community is as well-liked as cake itself. The baking channel in the app's Explore section is among the most popular, based on time spent perusing it. The hashtag "cake" has generated over 45 million posts, and "cakestagram" has toted up 1.8 million.
It's a big business opportunity for these bakers. While professional pastry chefs use Instagram to advertise their brick-and-mortar businesses, Cakestagram is driven by self-taught patissiers who work out of their homes and have no interest in opening up bakeries. Instead, they focus on online ordering, video content partnerships and social media-personality-driven workshops.
There's no tutorial on how to be cake-famous. Instagrammers often fall into business and sponsorship deals when companies reach out to them. Andrea Walters, a Wichita, Kansas, homemaker who runs a custom cookie company, was approached by the Roundup Cookie Retreat to teach two baking workshops, at which attendees pay $250 for weekend-long tutorials. Another popular baker, Ksenia Penkina, makes her classes available online for about $150 a video.
Christina, of Christina's Cupcakes, who declined for privacy reasons to have her last name published, has 181,000 followers but doesn't work with any content companies or even sell her wares. She began a mutually beneficial relationship with Satin Ice fondant and Fancy Sprinkles after they reached out to her and offered free product in exchange for posts featuring their products.
"I've been approached to do content creation, but I don't have a business plan," she said. "I don't know much about it."
Despite their popularity, many bakers such as Christina choose not to pursue full-time careers based on their digital cake fame.