What would you like on the cake? Answer: Nothing
CAKEWRECKS.COM | Web site shines a candle on decorators' weirdest creations
"Not a penis cake."
That was the bride-to-be's only request for her bachelorette party.
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When cakes go horribly wrong
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Simple enough. So her friend who was planning the bash called up a local bakery and relayed same.
But the elderly man who answered spoke English poorly and had a hard time understanding.
"Not ... a ... pen ... is cake?" he said, befuddled.
"Um, no. Not a PENIS cake. P-E-N-I-S. One word."
"Ohhhh, OK. ... PENIS, P-E-N-I-S."
Having finally gained clarity, he set to work decorating. Whimsical pink frosting streamers. Pink and white frosting flowers around the perimeter. And in the center, also fashioned from pink and white frosting, were four words: "Not a Penis Cake."
True story.
And it's but one rib-tickling example among dozens in Jen Yates' new book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong.
An outgrowth of her frequently hilarious and wildly popular blog cakewrecks.com, it is rife with often shocking photos of cakes sad, ugly and downright grotesque. Each wreck is accompanied by Yates' snarky, pop-culture-influenced commentary.
When she first began to blog, Yates posted shots of wrecks she'd found on her own. Nowadays her e-mail inbox is flooded with potential material from readers -- more than a few of whom offer up their own wrecks for Yates to mock.
Before a wreck is posted, Yates says, she does her utmost to make sure it was professionally made. Because that's the joke. Amateur disaster "wouldn't necessarily be funny," she says. "Unless you like laughing at stay-at-home moms and their hard work, which I don't."
A creepy brown, gecko-shaped cake (it looks more like a demon turtle) gets the "Ghostbusters" treatment:
"It's ... looking at me."
"He's an ugly little spud, isn't he?"
"I think he can hear you, Ray."
An edible rendition of a slumbering though seemingly dead baby garners the following: "Sure, the dear may look a bit more 'dearly departed,' what with the white marble slab, black toenails and various bloody streaks, but lookit that adowable widdle face! Don't you just want to eat it up?"
Several nausea-inducing "poo cakes" (pages 39-47) are the subjects of merciless mockery, too. As all poo cakes should be.
Yates, though, insists her zingers are entirely good-natured.
"My only intent is to make people laugh," the 31-year-old former clown and interior house painter says. "I'm not out to bash bakers."
"When the site was first started [in May 2008], a lot of people's gut reaction when they first saw it was 'This is another one of those sites,' the mean-spirited, let's all just get around and laugh at other people's hard work."
Now that it's been around for a while, she says, "almost every bakery you talk to has heard of it and usually has an appreciation for it. Probably it helps that some days we feature good cakes, too. I think now that they know me a little bit better, they know that I'm not trying to be mean, I'm not name-calling. I'm just trying to make light of something that's really a pretty lighthearted thing. It's only cake."
Maybe so, but not everyone takes her criticism well. In a handful of instances there have been vitriolic e-mails, Yates says. All-caps, cussing, name-calling.
"And that's hard, because I'm actually very tender-hearted and thin-skinned. I've gotten a little better since the site's been up. Because of [Internet] trolls and all that, you have to. But in the early days, oh, my goodness, they'd make me cry all the time. And John [her husband] would be like, 'Why are you doing this?' But fortunately it was very, very rare. I mean, I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I've gotten a nasty e-mail from the baker."
The razzing of an especially horrendous baby cake sparked anger most vituperative.
"It wasn't that bad," Yates says of her commentary, "but they just took a baby doll and took the head and the arms and stuck those onto a mounded cake. And so I [wrote], 'In order to serve this cake, first you have to pull all the arms and the head off.' And that was about it. It was a very short post. But, boy, the baker was not happy about that. Oh, no, no, no."
Yates says she'll gladly remove an offending photo from her blog if asked to do so by the baker. That rarely happens.
"In the early days they probably thought that wasn't the case. They probably thought I'd leave it up regardless and just laugh at them. That's not the case at all. I'm not out to make anybody feel bad or angry."
Most people, she says, know how to laugh -- even at themselves.
"A lot of bakers will send me their own stuff. ... Because [with] some of the cakes, it's not poor execution. It's just subject matter or something quirky or funny. Or poo-like."