A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons. Anyone who has ever smeared frosting on a baked good has made a Wreck at one time or another, so I'm not here to vilify decorators: Cake Wrecks is just about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.
Now, don't you have a photo you want to send me? ;)
May 29, 2014 When Jolene asked her bakery if they could fit an edible image of this flyer on a sheet cake for her, they assured her it'd be no problem:
;)
So, let's review: one rectangular image, one rectangular sheet cake.
How could they POSSIBLY wreck this up?
[drum roll, please]
TA-DAAAA!!
;)
Thanks to Jolene B. for going halfsies with us.
*****
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Reader Comments (59)
It's Kate and Leo on the door all over again.
THERE IS ROOM FOR BOTH!!!! (any way you slice it)
Jolene once tried to buy a cake
She saw it, and started to shake
How hard can it be?
Turn it 90 degrees
Guess it's hard when your baker's a flake...
Phenomenal Wrecker
With all respect to the wonderful Maya Angelou (Also women everywhere. Watch your backs, There seems to be a plot to cut us up in many nasty ways.)
Gifted bakers wonder where my secret lies
I’m not skilled or trained to make a cake that size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my printer
My scissor that clips
To make a pic fit right
I just give it some snips
I’m a wrecker
Phenomenal wrecker
That’s me
and wow don't those purple flowers "go" well with the photo - halves?
Please don't mind me while I bang my head against this brick wall over here...
Stereoscopic?
Maybe? If you cross your eyes
and drool really hard?
Face, and palm, joined together in perfect unity.
The stupid it burns... D: sharyn and haiku joy :D
Sheesh. I *might* be able to forgive them splitting the image up if they had made even the slightest attempt to match the frosting colors to it.
Square cake? Round hole? No.
Geometry eludes me.
I'll just cut it twain.
There once was a bakery whose staff
Thought they'd produce a laugh
It's girlie -- add posies!
Some nice purple rosies!
The image they sliced right in half.
Wow. I'm a bad poet today. Doesn't stop me from submitting the post though! RIP Maia Angelou
WHYYYYY?!?!?!?!? What was the thinking behind this? Why didn't they just rotate the cake 180 degrees.
Reunited (with apologies to Peaches and Herb)
I saw this cake and I sat down and cried
You said you could do this but you only lied
This break-up you made me is just loathsome and sad
I realize you tricked me
‘Cause it turned out bad, hey, hey
Just put the picture on top of the cake
How could you make this kind of dumb mistake?
I’ve never ever seen such sheer stupidity
I know now what you lack, it’s
Some lucidity, hey, hey
Reunited, it would feel so grand
Reunited ‘cause you don’t understand
There’s one way this fits
And, baker, this one’s not it….
We’d all be so excited
If ‘twas reunited, hey, hey
But they had to fit these flowers on the cake, they absolutely HAD to.
(Actually, did they?)
How bizarre to split the image like that! Nicely decorated, though. Love the purple flowers.
They were just practicing their creative license. Actually, it's too bad bakers don't have to have some kind of baking-related license. There could be a whole series of tests that measure their ability to follow directions: taking phone orders, interpreting written orders, learning how to turn a cake so you don't have to cut the picture in half . . . This could be revolutionary. I'm calling my congressman right now.
Maybe they did not have a piece of edible photo paper as big as the cake and felt impelled to improvise rather than confess to the customer they were unable, after all, to fulfill the request. Did our heroine actually pay for the wreck? Or did she stand up for Women's Rights?
*HEADDESK*
pour que whhhhhyyyyyyy?!?!?!?
Wow! And if they didn't want to rotate it, I'm pretty sure it still would have fit in the direction that they put it! And then they would still have had space for the non matchy roses.
What will they think of next! Haha love it..btw how can I submit a photo to the blog (I can't over FB for fear of offending the recipient of the cake)
(editor's note: Hi Lori! We'd love to see your wreck. Click on the link at the top of the page labeled "Contact". We'll keep our eye out for it! - the wrecksistant)
LOL @ Haiku Joy!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok, call me Ms Obvious. They had said cake not selling in said cake display. Take one image.. snip snip and VOILA!!
And once again they surprised me. No one ever thinks about turning the cake a quarter turn do they?
Well, you know, it's a "women's" cake, so why not take the liberty of altering the purpose or content in order to make room for a few pretty little flowers?
I'm going to say that they forgot about the cake till soon before pickup. The baker then realizing this, decided to print the image real quick and slap it on a premade. However, they realized they had no sheet cakes without decor, so they just cut the image in half and slapped it on. They were HOPING the customer wouldn't care and would be ok, because no specifics for it to stay whole was made.
Step 1: Buy cake pre-decorated from Wal-Mart or grocery store
Step 2: Print poster
Step 3: Cut in half
Step 4: Place halves on cake wherever they fit best.
Well, this was a sad choice.
Was it a male decorator? A misogynist male decorator?
I have heard that in the days when many monks spent their lives chained to their scriptoriums (scriptoria?) copying and illuminating manuscripts, it was considered better if the monk did not know how to read. Fewer distractions. Just the pretty pictures.
At least the flowers are pretty.
*sigh* I think I'll join miss_paper in some head/wall interaction.
I need to send you a couple photos - we wanted to get a photograph on a cake for my brother's birthday, and the baker instead did an interpretation of the photo in fondant. It was hilariously weird.
Was it still an edible image? I was imagining they just stuck a paper flyer on the cake.
This is a good example of what happens when you get stuck in one way of doing things...you can't see obvious solutions. Just cut it in half cuz she wants the whole thing on the cake. With some camouflage flowers...lol.
How? Whyyyy?? What was so difficult!?!? Weep weep
That cake has been sitting in their cooler for days...maybe weeks...with the flowers already on it and ready for a salutation to be piped on it. They just printed her image and stuck it on however it would fit. TA DA!! THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FROM A SUPERMARKET - Mass produced stale cake that is NOT custom made for you! ! Who REALLY truly believes you can get a fresh custom made cake from Walmart, HyVee, Price Chopper, or any other chain store? If you do, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you!
Do you think the bakers are TRYING to get on Cake Wrecks?? I'm starting to wonder....
This has got to be one of the dumbest wrecks ever made! It's like, did anyone at the bakery stop to think, "Wait, maybe we can turn the cake just so and voila! The image is whole, and we still have room for flowers."?
@Alison Even if they had to print it in two pieces, they could have still turned the cake 180 & matched the halves of the picture. There's just no excuse for this cake, except maybe a confession of stupidity & laziness.
If I was Jolene, I would've refused to take this cake, I would've insisted that they re-do it...while I supervised to make sure they did it right....
"See ma'am...we hafta put in on in two pieces..."
"No...you just turn it this way & put the top half here & the bottom right underneath, like so"
*baker's brain overloads & explodes*
Male cake decorators. Sheesh! ;)
The sad part is that poster is probably would have looked great as a cake. Just print it out the size of the cake, and put is on top of a fondant base. Simple and Classy... then change the main font on the poster....
fluffy cow, and vanessa- those comments are seriously spot on!
This reminds me of the one where they requested half a cake.
To be fair I work at Walmart and though our cake comes in frozen, we do still ice and decorate and try to make even our case cakes as fresh as possible by not making more than we need for a few days. As for cake orders we always use fresh cake, and do it no more than 24 hours ahead of the time of its pickup. If say most likely that this was a full sheet cake and the decorator chose half sheet size for the picture, which prints two pictures instead of one to make it big. It was just poor judgment on their part.
I don't think that rotating the cake 180 degrees would have helped.
Maybe 90, or even 270 degrees, but not 180.
To be honest grocery store bakeries have a lot of health codes that must be followed. So nothing sits in coolers for weeks at a time. Where I work everything is made and frozen immediately. Everything that comes in frozen and needs to stay frozen gets put away immediately. Nothing can stay in the fridge for more than 2 days. Just because the cakes are frozen doesn't mean they aren't fresh. Real bakeries bake cakes a week or two in advance in freeze them. I go thru some much cake where I work we got thru at least 15 cases of cakes a week and thats cake thats comes in with no frosting on it. They were made the week before frozen and then shipped to us frozen. So there is no difference although people tell us our cake taste better than most other bakeries including ones where they bake their cake in house.
I think Dani is right. They had a prepiped "shell" cake that they needed to unload before the health inspector saw it again and a manager demanding that the next sucker on the door be given it no matter what whether it was for a two-year-old or a 50-year-old man. The same manager who wonders why they don't get repeat business, not that it matters because Corporate is going to ax her soon anyway but it's okay because Autozone and CVS are hiring and they need someone with retail experience. Industry experience a plus, but not required, just like with the megachain food stores with "bakeries." As long as you can master the upsell and push those club cards, that's all that matters.
Of course, what the cake really needs are sperm balloons. No, frosting tampons! With a woman with a baby halfway out her hoohaw! What could be more womanier than that?
@Mel-that was hysterical! I get what's wrong with this cake, and the "thinking" that went into it, but I actually think it's kinda pretty. After I quit laughing, I would have taken it. :-)
OK, then - That cake wins an "unclear on the concept award!"
/sigh At least the random flowers are pretty!
@SaraCVT - A couple posts back you asked me to share my lembas recipe if I got it working... it did come out pretty good. =-) There are a lot of recipes on the web, and while many of them look delicious, most are just fancy biscuits/cookies, with little nutrition to really sustain a tired traveler. My son's and my challenge to ourselves was to make something that you really COULD possibly live off for long days of marching, without using anything that couldn't reasonably be found in Middle Earth. This is what we came up with:
My Lembas recipe:
1/2 cup sunbutter (sunflower seed butter), 1/2 cup crunchy almond butter, 1/4 cup pureed carrots (or 1 small jar baby food carrots), 1/3 cup birch syrup + 1 tbs (maple would do, but birch seems more Elvish, somehow), 1/4 pureed raisins, 1 cup honey + 1 tbs, 1/3 cup rose-hip tea +1 tbs, somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 cup acorn flour (because elves), ~1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (enough to make the batter thick)
Mix all wet ingredients, except the extra tablespoons of syrup, honey, and tea. Add acorn flour (go lightly), then add enough flour to get to the stage between a thick batter/soft dough. Spread/roll it out on a baking stone, and bake at 300 degrees until it appears cooked through. (The time will vary depending on thickness, and I forgot to time mine.) Remove from oven, and lightly spread with a mixture of the remaining syrup, honey, and tea, in the hopes that it will soak in (though mine didn't - but it was still good).
It comes out darker than the descriptions in the book, and I might fiddle with it sometime to correct that, but it was tasty and a fun cooking project. =-)
You know it is all her fault, she ordered a 16" x 10" cake and not a 10" x 16" cake, but then gave them an image that was 8" x 10" which clearly would not fit unmodified on the cake as ordered. Everyone should know that when they order the cake in the first place.