As a baking competition show with a title that is a question itself, Is It Cake? unsurprisingly piques a lot of curiosity. Between salivating over all the realistic creations, standing with your face one inch away from your TV set and tearing up over the wholesomeness of the contestants’ bonds, you may find yourself asking a lot of questions while watching the new series — questions beyond just “Is that really cake?” We enlisted one of the show’s executive producers, Dan Cutforth, to help stave off your hunger for answers. Here, Cutforth shares the inspiration behind the show’s concept, how the iconic cake wall works and even where that gold kitchen utensil throne is now.

Tell us about how the concept of the show came about. Was it really inspired by the Is It Cake? memes that blew up in July 2020?  That’s exactly how it came about. Like everyone else, we were seeing those social media posts and were entertained by them. Then we literally brainstormed the show. On the very first call, Jenn Levy [VP, Nonfiction at Netflix] just loved it, and next thing you know, we’re doing the show. So, it came together incredibly quickly and unusually so. 

What was it about those Is It Cake? memes that really grabbed you and made you think they could be translated into a show? We’ve done a lot of cooking and baking shows over the years, and this hit a lot of what tends to work about those kinds of shows, particularly baking. It’s very visual and it requires a great deal of accuracy — a stressful amount of accuracy. All of that together feels like a good basis for competition. Having also had the experience of creating Nailed It!, which came about through very similar inspiration, we knew that something like a grabby social media phenomenon, if you can build the format in the right way, can translate really, really well.

How did you go about finding contestants? Did you search via social media? Baking has become a huge thing on social media, so that was an easy place to start. Also, over the last few years — as there’s been a baking boom in this country, probably the last 10 years — there are so many local businesses. There are a lot of people around the country that are making a great living baking hyperrealistic cakes. So yeah, it was not that hard to find people who were really good at it.

Patrick Wymore/Netflix

Who baked all the cakes that weren’t made by the contestants, and were those cakes actually edible? Were they eaten after they were used? We have an exceptionally talented culinary team. Monika Stout is the cake artist who creates the hero cakes for us. There are basically three rounds of competition, and our contestants only make the cakes in the middle round. What I love about this show most of all is that the audience really can play along. They get to play the same game as the bakers in the first and last rounds. Then they get to play the same game as the judges in the middle rounds when the bakers are trying to fool the judges. 

Monika made what we call the hero cakes for round one and the cash cakes for the final round, and she headed up an incredible team of bakers. They had what we called “the cake lab.” It did feel like a mad scientist’s lab, where you would walk in and someone would be painstakingly carving a piggy bank or a shoe or something like that with the real one alongside it and experimenting with edible money and all of these kinds of things. 

It was always very important to us that each cake not just be some model that someone makes out of food ingredients, but that it really be something edible. So, every cake that was made on the show could be eaten. Some of them, I will say, you’d have to excavate through a pretty thick layer of modeling chocolate to get to the cake.

In terms of what happened to the cakes afterward, of the ones that were not eaten by judges, those cakes got pretty well hacked up with swords and machetes and really sharp knives. So, there wasn’t that much left to them. 

Did Mikey Day enjoy stabbing all those cakes? It looked so satisfying.  It was one of the most fun elements of the show. We very quickly realized Mikey needs to be trained on cutting cakes because it’s not easy to cut a cake in a way that maximizes how it looks on camera. So, we had different techniques depending on the shape of the cake. “Cut and spread” was one of them. “Slice and flop” was another. There were all these different expressions we had for how you had to cut the cake to maximize how it would look on TV.

Mikey is so amazing. He’s so effortlessly funny and improvisational. He also has this fascinating, big-kid energy. It doesn’t feel juvenile, but he has this sense of enthusiasm, awe and wonder, and he loved it. I think that doing SNL is very long hours and stressful and intense, and he loved the fun that he got to have on set every day with this. We’re not changing the world here. We’re just making some cakes that look like other things.

Well, speaking of the long hours of SNL, it did seem like the baking times for contestants to make their cakes were really long, like 8 to 12 hours. What did the other contestants who weren’t competing do during that time?  For the most part, the other bakers were sitting there. So, that kind of served two purposes. It created this sort of fun Greek chorus/peanut gallery of people commenting on what’s going on. Also, not everyone got to compete in every episode, so some of the bakers had to watch three episodes go down before they got to get in there themselves. But in the process, they were figuring out what tactics they would want to employ. They got to watch the mistakes that other people made, potentially, and they got a chance to really figure out the game. 

How does the cake wall work?  It served a practical purpose because the longer you can stare at a display where one of the things is a cake, the easier it is to figure out which one it is. So, we wanted to have a device that would create an exciting reveal and be a moment where you could be like, “Okay, now go.” The cake wall was great for that. The cake wall, essentially, is built on a turntable. There’s a wall in the middle of a circular turntable, and what happens is you build up the displays behind the wall, flip the wall around, and then flip it away again to replace it with a new display. That’s the theory of it. 

In reality, there were a few quirks to it. In order to light it, we had to have cables that wrapped around the turntables. So, you couldn’t keep spinning it in the same direction or all the cables would snap. So off camera, we had to spin the wall back at certain points. The other thing that’s kind of funny about it is we would have Mikey come around on the cake wall, but actually, it really starts with a jolt a bit like when a bus or subway car takes off. You actually have to hold on to something when the turntable starts or it can get a little bit hairy. We had to be super careful about making sure that it didn’t knock over the cakes or anything like that when the turntable came around. 

It just became this funny signature, slightly retro game-show element of the show. It was all part of the fun, silly tone of the show. In one moment, it’s a game show, and in another, it’s a cooking show. This is the kind of stuff that people may not even pick up on, but we really tried to set it up so that when it’s time to cook, the lighting conditions of the whole set totally change and it’s more like what you’d expect to see in a cooking show with white light so that the bakers could work. Then, when it gets to the game-show part, the lighting changes again and becomes more dramatic, and that also serves to make it slightly harder for anyone to discern which are the cakes.

Patrick Wymore/Netflix

How did you figure out how far away the judges needed to stand from the cakes and decoys in order to make the judging fair? We had to sort of figure that out in the first episode. We did a few tests in test studios, but you can’t really replicate the conditions of the studio until you have the studio, and we didn’t have it lit until the day before the first day of shooting. The first day of shooting, we had to make our decision of how far away they were going to be and then you just cross your fingers that you’ve got it right. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and it was one of the most nerve-racking days I’ve had on set ever. One of the things we had said to ourselves is, “What if the judges are never fooled and the show just doesn’t work?” We don’t know. And there are different judges every time. We just don’t know. Then we got to a different stage, and we felt like, “Have we made this too hard?” And you can make yourself crazy.

How did you come up with the episode themes? We came up with the themes based on the kinds of things that we thought would make good cakes. We didn’t want to do something that would be impossible — we couldn’t do an aquarium full of fish or something like that. They had to be real-life objects that are graphic enough or have the right sort of finish. We also just wanted the themes to be super relatable. We wanted these to be things that people see every day, not obscure things where it would be hard to know what it actually would look like.

Who was in charge of sourcing all decoys? We have a really amazing art department on this show, as evidenced by the Game of Thrones chair they made. They knew what all the decoys were going to be. So, imagine the first round where, let’s say, the theme is things that you buy in a department store. The art department has all kinds of different clothes and leather goods, all these sorts of things. Then the bakers had to pick one thing to make into a cake, and our art department had to find all the other things that look like they might be made out of cake, which is a skill in and of itself. So, our art department had to be ready. If someone wanted to make a pile of sweaters, then they had to have all these piles of sweaters ready to go. There was a warehouse full of all that stuff.

Since you mentioned it, where is that Game of Thrones–inspired kitchen utensil throne now?  That’s an excellent question. I have a feeling it might be in our office. Because of COVID, we don’t go into our office very much anymore, but I think it might be over there. Or it may just be in storage, waiting for Season 2. I must say that did kind of blow my mind a bit when I saw it. TV almost doesn’t do justice to how incredible that prop is.

Last question: Is this interview cake? Let’s find out!

This interview was edited and condensed for length and clarity.