When I first came across Julie McAllister’s work, my eyes couldn’t believe my brain. I knew it was a cake. But it looked like a delicious plate of oysters. Even right now I hardly believe it.

So I was shocked when Julie told me her career began with a failure (honestly relatable). Her first attempt at a decorated cake, a Christmas tree pulled from the glossy pages of a magazine, was such a disaster she still keeps a photo of it on her desktop. The tree slumped, the frosting sagged, and the result looked nothing like the inspiration. But the experience was electric and she had become a huge fan. “I had such a feeling of joy and creativity while making it that I had never experienced before, that I instantly knew I was hooked and cake decorating was going to be the ‘thing’ that took up space in my life,” Julie told me.

That moment of failure set the stage for a career defined not by perfection but by persistence. Julie’s world of hyper-realistic cakes is both art and engineering. She is someone who once considered becoming an architect and it makes sense. She explains that each cake begins with sketches, measurements, and internal structures before it ever touches buttercream. They are blueprints you can eat.

Julie’s career moved from local recognition to global stage with Netflix’s Is It Cake?. The show has become a phenomenon, blending game show tension with the viral internet trend of cutting into objects that turn out to be cake. It premiered in 2022 and was watched by millions of households around the world.

For Julie, the opportunity felt unreal. More than 15,000 people applied to compete, yet only a handful made it onto the set. Contestants are tasked with baking and decorating hyper-realistic cakes in just eight hours, a process that would normally take several days. The format demands precision, stamina, and a bit of theater.

The show matters because it brings hyper-realistic cakes into mainstream pop culture, turned bakers into global personalities with instant fandoms, and sparks a new wave of online content that treats cake as performance art.

The leap from Charleston cake studio to Netflix competition was both surreal and demanding, but the bigger surprise came after filming. By the end of the season, what started as a contest had turned into something else entirely. Julie describes her fellow cast members as a makeshift family of cake obsessives who have taken two trips together!

Fans of the show became fans of her. Fans of Julie became fans of the show. After the season aired, she was flooded with messages from strangers across the world. Parents watched with their kids, friends gathered to marvel at the trick of cake-as-object, and people showed up in person to meet her at bake sales hosted with fellow contestants. “We expected maybe one or two people to come,” Julie said. “But the response was unbelievable.” What she describes is fandom at work, not the passive kind, but the kind that transcends screen time and shows up in person to create new connections.

What surprised Julie most was how much joy she has found in teaching. Early on, she did not see herself as a teacher. Now, workshops and tutorials have become the center of her business. She lights up when she talks about the spark in her students’ eyes.

She describes watching them arrive timid, convinced they cannot create something beautiful, and leave radiant with pride. “It gives me such a profound sense of happiness,” she said. The messy joy of her first cake has become something she now hands to others.

What I love about this shift is that Julie does not gatekeep her skills. She could easily position herself as the rare talent who alone can pull off hyper-realistic cakes, asking the rest of us to simply watch from afar. Instead, she invites people in. She teaches, shares, and proves that cake-as-art is not only something you can marvel at but also something you can learn to do. That generosity feels like a truer reflection of fandom than anything else: passing the spark along so more people get to feel it for themselves.

PS: Julie now offers tutorials on her website! I love how accessible she’s making it for people to enter into this life changing world.

Julie’s story shows that fandom thrives when the orbit around The Center is activated. If you are at the center of a fandom, or working to build one, here are a few ways to keep it alive:

And as always, I had to as Julie what she’s a fan of right now:

“This almost seems like a cop out, but I am currently fanning so hard for Ina Garten and Martha Stewart. To be fair, I have always been a super fan of Ina Garten. For me it comes down to there is an undercurrent that feels like it's always looming that you should be super successful right now and have everything figured out as a business owner, but these two icons are literally at the top of the game, the most successful they've ever been and they're in their 70s and 80s. To have that kind of career longevity and be such an inspiration to people all over the world, that is truly incredible. As for my current favorite cookbook, I'm on such a tahini kick right now and I've been baking my way through the Rachel Simons book Sesame–it's so good!”