There’s a heated debate going on over at a blog called “Cake Wrecks” about whether or not this cake can possibly be “real.” We’re feeling extremely skeptical ourselves, but the blog’s author swears up and down that the pictures came from a real (outraged) bride who really hired a member of the family who was supposed to be a “professional with tons of experience” to make her wedding cake.
From Cake Wrecks (the picture on the right is supposedly what the bride ordered):
1) The top tier still had the Springform pan under it.
2) The cake “base” is a metal sign.
3) I swear I am not making this up.
…
Now like you, I’m sure, I was highly skeptical about this being a “professional” cake. However, the e-mail came from the bride herself, and she seemed outraged enough to be telling the truth. (Yes, a replacement cake was procured at the eleventh hour.) I can only assume the icing and generic tips in the photo were purchased to try and “fix” the cake after it was picked up. In fact, Vicky C., if you’re reading this, you might want to chime in on the Comments section now, just to back me up here.
[crickets chirping]
Vicky? Er, Vicky, c’mon now, this isn’t funny.
Whatever the real story is, someone made this cake and that’s hilarious enough all on it’s own. Picturing someone trying to “fix” this cake with a ziplock bag full of green icing… Oh dear. We’ve got the giggles.
Oh, and if you enjoyed this alleged disaster, here’s another one that’s almost as bad.
I Think I’ve Just Been Punk’d [Cake Wrecks] (Thanks, Kerry!)
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That’s why A) i’m going to attempt my own wedding cake (and I have lots of time for now to try out different recipes and styles ^_^) and B) i’m prepared to run out to the Russian Bakery and buy 2-3 already made cakes and have some variety at my wedding. LOL.
@katiat325:
That’s nifty good idea. Best of luck!
I have a family member who does cakes on the side, but she’s experienced with fondant and buttercream frosting, and everything I’ve seen her do has come out at least good, if not great. She doesn’t charge much at all – she mostly caters to the special event/wedding/baby shower circuit at her church, which is very much a small town congregation. She refuses to do it as a “business” or even advertise. But I think even she would tell anyone to get pictures of actual cakes made by the baker first, because even in her amateur sideline she keeps pictures around of her cakes around for future reference.
Personally, I’m excited to go check out the cake wrecks site. I love wrecks. I’m a rubbernecker.
I cried at all the puppy cakes – and snorted and cried some more. And the mouse-filled cake? Genious!
The Tiffany style cake is actually not THAT difficult, however, you need to know how to work with fondant. Commercial-grade ovens are a plus as well.
However, I do think that people put too much emphasis on the cake. Sure it looks pretty, but no one goes to a wedding to enjoy the cake. I think it’s a better idea to get a small cake for the bride and groom to cut for pictures, etc. They can also freeze it or what not for their first anniversary. A simple (but tasty) sheet cake can then be used to feed the guests. No one will know the difference, trust me!
@DePaulBlueDemon: While that may be true, the cake is also featured in many photos. I went to a professional bakery that made the cake I had at one of my friends’ weddings, and the prices were higher than I had imagined. I asked whether we could do a smaller two-tier cake and then a sheet cake, the consultant said yes, but the sheet cake would be $75 and we had to do two because one only fed 40 people and the two-tier cake only fed 40 people.
Also, we were having the wedding at a country club room and it was a really big room so a small cake would get absolutely dwarfed. We stuck to a three-tier cake and just negotiated very, very well.
I used to be a professional baker and there were many times when we’d do a rush order to make right what another ‘professional’ had ruined. Having seen some amazingly crappy wedding cakes in my time, I can believe that some people will consider almost any disaster worthy of delivering as long as they feel their work is done.
The only time I’ve really been shocked by the cake at a wedding was at my husband’s cousin’s wedding, where a lovely, professional cake was brought out and sliced for the wedding party. . .and then wheeled away so squares of bottom-basement cheap supermarket cake could be served to the guests.
We’re talking one thin layer of dry cake covered in plain white, fake ‘buttercream’ icing and otherwise devoid of decoration. I’ve seen sloppy cakes, ugly cakes, engineering disaster cakes and flat-out ridiculous cakes, but nothing makes my jaw drop quite like cheaping out on the guests.
On my wedding day there were problems with my grooms’ cake. The person we hired lost power and ended up having to make my cake in an hour. The cake was fantastic and looked outstanding. (It was a Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle) Considering the 1 hour make time. She was just this little independent baker we know in New Orleans, we just know her as the “Cake Lady” I’d get another cake from her in a heartbeat.
Wait. There’s an entire blog devoted to cake wrecks?! a) where has that been all my life? and b)There’s an entire blog devoted to cake wrecks?
I made a friend’s wedding cake. It was among the most stressful things I’ve ever done. The first test cake I made was HORRIBLE so needless to say I practiced several times after that. To top it all off, a two weeks before the wedding I got to hear the MIL’s freakout about an “amateur cake”.
Fortunately it worked out okay for me, but I now understand why people pay thousands of dollars for professional cakes.
What the hell is a “groom’s cake”? Did someone come up with another thing to spend money on for a wedding?
This one is infinitely more funny and likely real.
Dial-a-Cake Disasters
Sigh, Dial-a-Wreck
Sorry, my html is lacking.
My mother made my wedding cake. She is not a professional baker, and in fact, isn’t a very good cook. She made me a Schwarzwälder Kirsch cake, from scratch. It looked kind of sloppy, but it tasted magnificent, and that’s all I cared about.
Bah, link didn’t take. Here it is: [en.wikipedia.org]
Jeeezus Christ. I’ve never even baked a cake in my entire life, and I’m pretty sure I could do better than that. Wait… I actually did bake one at school when I was eleven. My mother might have thrown it out of the window ‘for the birds’, laughing, because it was too hard/heavy/whatever (true story, she did), but at least it looked like a cake.
The second picture? That’s just tackiness. Tiffany box wedding cake? Blech.
WTF is the bag of marshmallows for?
they’re both pretty bad, but I think the plaid is worse. it doesn’t even use close to the same colors that the display uses!!
Man, we dodged a bullet. We got married at a historic inn and just sent their chef a photo of what we wanted ahead of time, and we got a perfect cake. Frankly, for what professional wedding cakes cost (though ours was not that pricey, relatively speaking), it never occurred to us that we’d get anything that wasn’t perfect.
@Snakeophelia: You just sent the chef a photo? Did you try a sample of any work? Wow. When I did consultation with bakeries and chefs, we talked about what fillings we wanted, the softness or firmness of the cake, what kind of cake we wanted, the thickness of the filling, whether we wanted more neutral tastes or sweeter…and THEN we got to how it would look!
Thanks for the poll! I like how truth is democratic.
@Matthew Hughes: Roflcopter!
Also, the whole Cake Wrecks site is hilarious. I could care less about cakes, but it’s funny and really well-written! Worth it for that link alone.
It kinda looks like the volcano I made for 4th grade.
my wife and i were considering having family make our wedding cake until i showed her the plaid cake
Just to add to wedding cake stories….
My cousin and her now-husband decided to make their own wedding cake. OMG, how embarrassing!
First, the fondant was about as smooth as the green-and-white cake in the picture above – as in not very smooth. Second, since the fondant “was too difficult to work with” they decided to put a 1/2″ layer of it on the cake, rather than the standard wafer-thin layer. It was like having a layer of bubblegum on the cake! Ick!
Did make a funny sight watching them try to cut through the thick layer of fondant, though.
Family + Business = Teh Bad News.
The plaid cake from the link wins hands down. Because there was no fix; that terrible cake showed up at the wedding and everyone had to look at it.
Also, why are ugly cakes so damn funny?
That was HILARIOUS. I emailed that cakewreck link to my sister.
A friend of mine I worked with at a cafeteria got married and the food company made her cake. It was a three-tier, turquoise and white cake with pillars. It was kind of pretty, but the reception was at the park and the cake fell apart in the heat before it started. It was tasty, anyway.
Hey, my mom made my wedding cake, and it was stunning. (Then again, she’d been making wedding cakes for about 25 years at that point, and she’s seriously OCD about stuff like that, so we knew it would be awsome. She won’t do it professionally, but she often gives cakes as wedding gifts.)
Luckily, this was before the fondant craze – yuk. (We did have fondant flowers on it, but they were for LOOKING AT, not EATING. Yuk, again.)
When my cousin got married, she and her husband got great wedding cakes that looked great and tasted great. They did an Halloween theme and the cakes were made to look like jack-o-lanterns and such. That having been said, when ever I read one of the wedding drama articles, I always think to myself that if I ever have kids, I’ll tell them they can get just as married at the county courthouse for a fraction of the cost.
The fact that someone can bake doesn’t mean they can bake “professionally.” My mother is what I would call a para-professional baker–she bakes certain items (layer cakes, cheesecakes, etc.) for my husband’s family’s restaurant. She does this out of her home kitchen, and takes money in return for the cake. Although she can do this well, and people really like her stuff, there is NO WAY I would have let her make my wedding cake. Could she have made a tiered cake with white icing? Sure. Would I have been pissed as hell if it was crooked or lopsided? Yep. I saved myself the trouble and hired an actual professional to do the job.
I also previously worked at a cook in a country club for 7 years. We did lots of wedding receptions–more than I can count–and I have seen all manner of wedding cakes–the good, the bad, and the hideously ugly. The worst was another “My aunt is a *great* baker” cake. 4 tiers, each a different layer of betty crocker/duncan hines (I LOVE boxed cake mix, so that’s not my beef), lopsided, pink icing, sprinkles, etc. That’s not even where it goes truly horrible. I was cutting the cake to serve back in the kitchen, and I kept hitting resistance in the fun-fetti sprinkle layer. It turned out to be spaghetti. Dried, baked-in, spaghetti. In. The. Cake. Turns out auntie/mom/granny either didn’t clean out the cake pan well before pouring in the batter, or cooked dinner next to the unbaked and somehow managed to get spaghetti all the hell in that cake.
The bottom line from my point of view is that, unless you’ve SEEN Aunt Jane’s cakes before your wedding day, you may not want your big event to be the first time she attempts a multi-tiered, layered-and-filled-sponge, fondant-covered cake. I’m trying hard not to be a shill for the wedding industry, but sometimes it pays to hire a professional.
@NYGal81: Edit: I was back in the kitchen cutting the cake to be served to the guests.
vacation = poor grammar
Hmm. New possible business venture: “Emergency Wedding Cakes”?
PROFIT
I’d believe it. I worked as a cashier at a Super Wal-mart before (longest 9 months of my life) and had a “professional” baker that would come in and buy cake mixes and present her tax exempt card for them. Nice…if I’m paying someone to make a cake it better not be made from box of cake mix. I can bake and bake things well but I’m not good at decorating cakes. I can make a plain layered cake just fine but I don’t practice piping icing or things like that so I wouldn’t try to attempt it.
That’s got to be fake…I’m by no means whatsoever a cook or baker (I can barely make a decent grilled cheese sandwich!) but even I can make way better cakes than that!
The evidence:
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@Petra: As someone who HATES fruit pies, I have to say you did a bang up job with yours (photo 2).