This Video of Someone Using an Old-School Cake Cutter Made Us Realize We’ve Been Doing It Wrong for Decades

published Jun 22, 2021
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Credit: Photo: Joe Lingeman; Food Styling: Jesse Szewczyk

After a year of staying inside and avoiding germs due to a global pandemic, many of the traditions around birthday cake have gone from sweet to questionable. Kids’ birthday parties have seen a resurgence of cupcakes to keep everyone’s confection completely separate, and savvy entrepreneurs have invented creative ways to keep up the ritual of candles without needing to spray down the cake with sanitizer afterward.

Cutting cake is a tough task to do neatly, but most people can accomplish it with either a few tools or the help of their finger. But somebody else’s finger in your cake is not a simple matter to wave away anymore. Still, as with so much, there is already an old answer for this new problem. “We found this old-fashioned cake cutter at a thrift store,” explains the first video the TikTok creator, Anna Kristin, posted. “And it works!” she adds.

The tool in question is a simple metal piece formed into a slice shape, but with an open end facing the user. You simply find your desired slice of cake, press down, and then with a gentle squeeze, you can lift the slice from the cake easily without needing any extra tools — or most importantly, anyone else’s fingers.

Anna posted about this smart tool back in May, and her TikTok feed has since filled with videos that have racked up thousands and sometimes millions of views of her cutting up cakes. She’s also cut cheese, pie, and cheesecake.  She even went back to the thrift store to retrieve a second cake cutter she’d seen there after someone pointed out that it also comes in square versions for cakes that are not round.

Watching these videos might not be super helpful if you can’t count on such a thing being available at your local thrift shop — and it probably isn’t, especially after this video has gone around. Thankfully, you can find similar tools on Amazon (at least for now).