An upside-down wedding cake frosted in black is a divorce cake created by celebrity chef and baker Duff Goldman from Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, Md. Event planners, bakers, lawyers and academics note the rise of “divorce parties” over the last several years, many with cakes featuring weapon-wielding brides or gloomy black frosting on inverted tiers. Goldman, chef and owner of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore and Charm City Cakes West in Los Angeles, said he has been creating divorce cakes for a decade, with one or so orders a month nowadays.NEW YORK – Divorce, it seems, has turned into a party – special cakes and all.
Event planners, bakers, lawyers and academics note the rise of “divorce parties” over the last several years, many with cakes featuring weapon-wielding brides or gloomy black frosting on inverted tiers.
“I’ve taken to naming them freedom fests, as you aren’t celebrating the end of the marriage but the freedom you have chosen in your life,” said Richard O’Malley, a New York-area event planner who organized one divorce blowout that cost a woman about $25,000.
Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a marketing professor at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, has been to a few such parties and sees them as part of a larger trend in celebrations.
“People are also celebrating ‘coming out’ to their parents or co-workers, and the birthdays of their pets. Cancer survivors are celebrating relevant milestones of being cancer-free. There has been an enormous increase in the variety of things that Americans celebrate,” she said.