Beautiful Flower Cakes By Our Favorite South Korean Cake Maker

Hyungyun Choi is a self-taught buttercream cake designer based in Seoul, South Korea. Capable of sculpting even the most intricate and lush flowers out of homemade buttercream frosting, she produces some of the most elegant designs we’ve come across in the super trendy landscape of floral cakes– a genre of cake design that has reached almost asymptotic ubiquity on social media. (And it’s easy to see why.)

Choi’s Instagram (@soocake_ully), moreover, is a treasure trove for people who love flowers, food styling, and cake. What started as a hobby has now led the once novice baker to the height of Instagram fandom. “Six years ago, I happened to see a cake made of buttercream and it was so pretty and impressive,” she said. “I made it from then on.”

Before that, Choi says she had a “normal office job” that allowed her to experiment in the kitchen for fun.

Choi doesn’t sell her cakes, but she does offer occasional workshops on how to make them– including a forthcoming workshop in New York, from August 31 to September 3, 2018. (More info about registration can be found here.)

Despite how lifelike her designs look, she insists that she only uses buttercream– no fondant or props, let alone real flowers. (Even though using real flowers on cakes is also a trend.)

“Deep flowers,” Choi says, “are the hardest ones to make– one of [the most difficult] is the English Rose.” The shadowing effect that develops underneath petals that have a lot of depth is hard to recreate in edible form; there’s more room for error, she says, and the grooves have to be more precise. Still, Choi makes it work, and we have been consistently impressed by her designs and how they continue to evolve. Not only are her flowers beautiful and biologically accurate, but her designs could rival that of even the most seasoned florist. It’s often hard to believe they are made of sugar.