It always amazes me whenever someone can bake. I can cook – and well – but the baking skill has always eluded me. The closest I come to baking perfection is buying cookies from the store and warming them up myself.
But one Los Angeles-based baker is wowing social media with her custom cakes that also double as works of edible art. With a background in event planning and a passion for design, Alana Jones-Mann brings these two elements together in her work. Besides being able to do the conventional cake-decorating themes like flowers and festive holidays, Alana has also found a huge source of inspiration from the humble shag rug.
Alana’s carpet-themed confections perfectly capture the spirit of the 70s through her colorful and abstract designs that have textured surfaces. Just like her popular cactus cupcakes, all her retro rug cakes come covered in buttercream frosting. She uses a meticulous piping technique in order to capture the vibe of the fuzzy floor rugs, using many psychedelic patterns for a free-spirited aesthetic.
Shag carpeting isn’t the only element of interior design that excites Alana. She has also been known to draw inspiration from other elements such as decorative wall hangings, retro-patterned wallpaper, black and white tiling, as well as indoor terrariums. No matter which aesthetic she’s using in her baking, each cake she decorates is a perfect representation of Alana’s decorating skills as well as her mantra that “it’s all about the details.”
If you want to foray into the world of cake decorating, you can check out her Alana Jones-Mann website to pick up a few tutorials and insightful how-to’s.
You can see some her baked goods definitely resemble interior design pieces such as wall hangings:
Wallpaper:
“https://www.instagram.com/p/BJei3KCDGa6/
Tiling:
Terrariums:
And, of course, potted plants:
For more of Alana’s quirky cake designs, you can see the full range on her Instagram.