Good Luck Wrecking The Castle!
July 30, 2015 Joanna H. ordered this cake for her 30th birthday:
;)
The horse shoe is for luck.
BECAUSE SHE'S GONNA NEED IT, AMIRITE?
Ahem.
Here's what Joanna got instead:
;)
Insert "the trots" joke here. BAHAA TOILET HUMOR.
Whitney M. wanted a cake that looked like Neuschwanstein castle for her husband's 30th birthday.
Here's a picture of the castle for reference:
;)
Ha! Come on, now, you'd have to pay someone at least four hundred bucks for a cake like tha...
"I paid $400 for this cake," Whitney writes, "plus $100 for delivery!!!!!!"
Oh. Well, ok, then. Um...
;)
Bummer.
And finally, here's the cake Terrisa K. ordered for her wedding:
;)
So, ya know, that's gonna end well.
She writes: "I didn't see the cake until I was actually walking down the aisle, whispering to my dad, 'is that my f***ing cake?!'"
;)
Yes, Terrisa. Yes, it is.
Thanks to Joanna H., Whitney M., & Terrisa K. for showing us what's black and white and wrecked all over.
*****
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Reader Comments (55)
The two other cakes are nightmares. I got nothing how things get lost in translation.
The castle cake is not a wreck for $400 plus delivery fee. To get a show piece, verbatim cake (which I'm guessing what Whitney wanted) is 3K+ in my area, not including delievery fee. My friend makes architectural cakes, and she has a minimum of two people work on them. They are tasty, beautiful and over two thousand dollars.
My friend has many people walk in and want something like the castle cake on a $500 budget. She sends them their way. Any compromise is going to get snared on (like the famous "do butter cream instead of fondant"), and it's not worth the hassle.
Positive, it's a castle and it made it to the venue in one piece.
I hate when people want a cake that is three days worth of non stop work for $200, but it's the company's fault for either a) over reaching, or b) throwing their employees under the bus (make the magic happen) or c) sling an low rent cake and just steal the money.
I know I'm posting a comment two years later, but I just couldn't stay quiet after reading the other comments. The commenters who say the castle cake isn't so bad need to get their eyesight checked. At least four of the towers are made of plastic, two of which have frosting blobbed straight onto the plastic. There's piles of gray poo on top of some towers. The locations of towers are nothing like the original -- and where did they come up with the weird gap between the front wall and the tower on the right? The only parts that people pointed out as looking good come straight from store-bought kits, and the rest looks like the decorator has exactly one skill: Frosting-Bag-Squeezing.
But the thing that gets me most is how terrible the sense of scale and proportion is. If you scaled up the cake castle to the real size, those windows would be dozens of feet tall and wide. That's what makes this cake look like a cartoon. What makes it a bad cartoon is the lack of internal consistency. You have to have the same level of detail throughout, not stonework here and goo blobs there, or windows that are 10 feet tall here, 60 feet tall there, and 100 feet tall there, or a reasonably-nice tower here and a plastic pole there. There's a reason you'll never see plastic poles poorly disguised as towers in a Sunday Sweet.
In short, the problem here is that the decorator promised something they literally couldn't deliver even if you paid them $40,000, because they lack the skill to do it and the eye for detail necessary to know they can't do it. Saying that $400 is not enough to pay for what the client wanted is both true and completely moot. A skilled decorator like my mom would have told the client that the price was insufficient and found a compromise, such as painting a picture of the castle on the cake, or making an artsy or cartoon version, or doing only one part of the castle in 3D (e.g. the big square tower, the front wall, etc.). She would never have said to herself, "The client is only paying enough for me to provide plastic poles that have giant gaping black windows surrounded by round gray blobs, so that's what I'll do."
I'm blown away by the comments defending the castle. I know we're at the age of "just concentrate on whatever 'good' we can find and blow off the rest," but I just don't understand how anyone can compromise enough to say it looked like Neuschwanstein instead of Chrystin's 6th birthday cake. Made by her 12 year old sister Britynnie.
There is no defense for the wrecked Wilton Castle cake. None! For the people who, two years ago, thought it wasn't THAT bad, it still is. Do yourselves a favor and google "castle cake". Heck, google "Neuschwanstein castle cake". View up, and then look at Wilton Castle again. You're welcome.
castle cake isn't bad the colors are right etc. however, it is not a 400 dollar job, nor should they have agreed to the work. the towers that imitate the picture have swirl iced tops for no good reason, the other towers are completely different for a very good reason - the Baker followed some online directions for a mosque model or cake. it has 4 minarets lol. and they're also the cleanest/ nicest part of the cake. I think instead we have an art history student as Baker that wanted to criticize their taste in architecture- Hagia Sofia all the way!