Ashley Duarte is a Dallas baker and the owner of Chula's Cakes. She jumped on this trend early on and found success with it both on- and offline. Chula’s has been in business for just a couple of years and is run out of Duarte’s home, but videos of her burn-away cakes have racked up thousands of views on TikTok. That's a lot of clout for a small operation.
“I wasn't really active on Tiktok or Instagram,” Duarte tells the Observer. “They always tell me to post content, and I'm just not really sure what I should post. So the one time I did post the burn-away cake it had, like…I forgot how many views. It’s crazy.”
The local baker’s work has attracted attention from across the country and around the world.
“I've gotten a lot of orders from Tiktok,” she says. “I think one was, like, from London. [...] To me, that's just crazy. Because I'm like just a small business owner and the one little video I posted went crazy.”
Burn-away cakes can be created in a couple of different ways, but Duarte prefers to use wafer sheets. She places the sheet over the top layer of frosting at a height where the fire won’t damage the cake itself.
There are a few different edible and flammable materials that can achieve the desired effect, but Duarte says the choice to use wafer sheets is all about timing.@chulascakes1 #BurnAwayCake #HeartCake #ForYouPage #ChulasCakes #DallasCakes #Prince #PurpleRainCake ♬ Purple Rain - Soundtrack Orchestra
“They've timed it where it's right at 45 seconds to a minute for our wafer paper to burn,” she explains. “That’s pretty much how long it takes to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’”
One of her earliest creations was a birthday cake for her older sister that was worthy of a party in 1999.
“My sister’s, like, in love with Prince,” she says. “So we had a purple, heart-shaped cake with her birth date on top. She didn’t know what a burn away cake was and everybody there videotaped it and we put it to a Prince song. It was so cool.”
Anniversaries and other personal and professional milestones are other common occasions of this fiery tribute.
“I’ve had people do anniversary burn cakes where it’ll have a current picture of them on top and it burns away to reveal a picture of them as teenagers or getting married,” she says. “I've also had people like influencers that have reached so many followers on Tiktok or so many followers on YouTube and they'll have that underneath.”
Duarte prefers each of her cakes to be one-of-a-kind and personal to her clients. There is, however, one oft-repeated design request she finds herself obliging.
“Lana Del Rey,” she laughs. “[The first one] was for a customer’s daughter and then [her friend] was like, ‘I need another one. The exact same thing.’ There were three or four requests after that. [...] I never knew who she was so I'm over here looking at pictures because I really didn't know about her music or anything.”
(Anyone familiar with Del Rey’s work knows that a flaming heart-shaped cake with the artist’s face on it sounds exactly like something her fans would want.)
Outside of creating burn-away cakes, Duarte creates and donates desserts to local nursing homes and veteran facilities for occasions like the 4th of July or Mexican Independence Day.
“Little things like that are dear to my heart,” she says. “It makes their day so much better and doing that warms my heart.”
Her heart may be warmed, but the cakes are served at an average temperature. These donated cakes are not of the fiery variety, which is probably for the better since they often bear the image of the American or Mexican flag.
“These are regular cakes, but they look really fancy,” Duarte says. “They're rosette cakes. [...] For the Mexican flag, they’re red, white and green. And then I'll make an edible image for the emblem with the eagle and the snake.”
Like any other art, baking is trial and error. It can be easy to get caught up in the moment at events, so Duarte is grateful that videos on social media allow her to properly take pride in her work.
“I was amazed with myself because when you do it, it might not come out as good as you thought," she says of her sister’s Prince cake that her family filmed for her. “But whenever I looked at the video, it was like, ‘Wow, this cake came out perfect.’ Like, it burned perfectly. [...] But seeing [my sister’s] excitement was the best part of it.”
More information about Chula’s Cakes and how to order a burn-away cake can be found on the business' Instagram page.
