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Jen Yates has a roundup of cake wrecks celebrating the Super Bowl. Can you decipher the message on these cupcakes?
HINT: It’s starts with the word “gone.”
Both teams are represented equally in the collection at Cake Wrecks. Link
Imagine receiving a cake in your honor that’s shaped like a foot! Cake Wrecks found five of them. One is for a podiatrist, one is a groom’s cake, and the others? Who knows! The cake shown here may be a commemoration of some sort of injury, but at least it doesn’t have a fungus or a toe-tag! Link
Jen Yates, of the blog Cake Wrecks, published the book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong in 2009. The response was so great, she and her husband John went to work on a new book. That book, Wreck the Halls is available now. In it, you’ll find hundred of holiday cakes, 232 pages of them, that are doubly sweet: you get to laugh at them, and someone got to eat them. Here’s a sampling for you.
The book begins with just a couple of Halloween cakes, and quickly moves on to Thanksgiving. There’s an entire section of turkey cakes, both the feathered kind and the cooked kind, all looking like something besides turkeys. And some are mashed up with other Thanksgiving traditions.
But I was particularly drawn to this cornucopia.
Maybe because it reminded me of this guy:
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When we were very young, we learned how to place things in order: first second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. Some of us went on to decorate cakes that wished children a Happy Birthday with their age specified as an ordinal number. But occasionally, the numeric abbreviation for an ordinal gets messed up. Cake Wrecks has eight, count ‘em, eight cakes with the ordinals 1th, 2th, and 3th. Link
During graduation season, we see and hear the word “congratulations” a lot. There are also a lot of cakes made for graduation parties -but there are also a lot of cake decorators who cannot spell the word. Some shorten it to “congrats” and STILL misspell it! Cake Wrecks has a glorious roundup of recent congratulation cakes you are sure to get a kick out of. Link
Yes, it’s customary to celebrate happy occasions with cake, but if you think about it, you need cake much more during the bad times. So forget greeting cards filled with platitudes – use cakes filled with sugary goodness!
Jen over at Cake Wrecks has a fantastic post about some unusual uses of cakes to deal with life’s sadder moments: Link
Cake Wrecks has a roundup of cakes in which words just don’t fit. This one made me laugh -the line break would have been just fine if they had spelled it correctly! Link
Over yonder at our wide-format Neatorama Spotlight blog, our friend Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks has written a very neat post about some of the weirdest Star Wars cakes ever made: Link
Cake Wrecks Book
A couple of weeks ago, we featured Jen Yates’ new book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
From Avid Cake Wreck Reader Rebecca: "I read on your site that you had taken cake decorating classes with your husband. I wondered if you ever posted one of your cakes as a wreck?"
And the answer is: Yes! You’d have to check the comment section to know this, but the infamous Epcot (aka Spaceship Earth) cake was made by me and John. That’s part of why it was so funny when so many commenters told me I was wrong to call it a Spaceship Earth cake. Yep, we got a *huge* kick out of that – and still do when readers make a "I think that’s Epcot" crack on a new post. Heh.
Thank you Jen and congratulations, Rebecca! See more at Jen’s blog Cake Wrecks
Neatorama Mystery Sale
It’s done! After two solid weeks of shipping, all shipments finally went out. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Mystery Sale!
If you haven’t gotten yours yet, please be patient: it may be in the last batch, which means that you should get it either by next week or early the following week (USA) or add a week for customs clearance for international destinations.
New at the Neatorama Shop
M-Cups, the measuring cups shaped like matryoshkas or Russian nesting dolls are HOT – we’ve sold out of the current batch and are waiting for our next shipment … if you order them today, we’ll add a little extra "mystery" bonus to your order.
Take cakes that are so bad they're good, mix in a great sense of humor and what do you get? A madly popular blog phenomenon, and now, a book as well! Jen Yates, the founder of Cake Wrecks, one of my all time favorite blogs, has graciously agreed to do an interview about cakes, the universe and everything.
But first: the book. As I'm sure you all probably already know or can
guess, Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
But there's something very subtle about the book that made me appreciate
Jen and Cake Wrecks even more. This is something I came to realize only
after I read the advance copy of the book (I know, I know, the perks of
being a famous blogger). Cake Wrecks is actually the celebration
of having a bad cake. It's an homage to Murphy's Law asserting itself
over flour, sugar, egg and shortening mixed together
and popped in the oven.
Think about it: how many birthday parties have you gone to and not remember a whit of what happened? Now, if you had one where the cake was horribly wrong (but still very yummy) - wouldn't that stick in your memory forever? (I can imagine the conversation - Q: "Hey, remember that party with the foot cake?" A: "Yeah ... good times!")
'Nuff said. Let's get on with the interview:
Neatorama: Before we talk about cakes, I'm curious about what you wrote for the "About the Author" portion of Cake Wrecks, and I quote "Jen has been a clown, a cash office accountant, a Jungle Cruise skipper, a business owner, a children's book inventory expeditor, and a house painter."
Now, if you don't mind - a clown? Really? What's that like? Did you come up with your own Jungle Cruise skipper jokes? And just what the heck is a children's book inventory expeditor? Sounds like a smuggling ops.
Jen Yates: Hah! Yes, I do have some interesting "work" experience. Ok, let's see...being a clown? That can be surprisingly difficult, on account of your not being allowed to retaliate while being kicked in the shins by a horde of candy-seeking 9-year-olds. Heheh. Other than that it was a blast, though. I learned to juggle, make balloon animals, and perform funny skits. This was during my teens, so that's also where I first learned public speaking skills, believe it or not. We visited hospitals, shelters, expos, churches, you name it.
Jungle Cruise was also fabulous, and yes, we got to ad lib a bit. That's where my love of puns truly blossomed. There's this crashed plane on the ride, and I made a game of fitting as many plane puns as possible into the few seconds we had before it passed out of sight. (I think I got up to 8 or 9.) I wasn't happy until the whole boat was groaning in agony.
My other jobs were less glamorous. The expeditor gig? That was me in a cubicle calling various national warehouses to see if their shipment had arrived yet. Lots of spreadsheets. :)
Neatorama: What's the very first cake that got you thinking of creating Cake Wrecks - the cake that started it all?
Jen: Yes, that cake really and truly DID start it all. My friend Abby e-mailed it to me, and the idea for Cake Wrecks just hit me. I think I started the blog that very night, just for fun.
Neatorama: What's your favorite cake wrecks?
Jen: My favorites are usually the ones with the communication breakdowns. The literal stuff like the Under Neat that cake, and then the garbled phone order ones.
Cake submitted by Elizabeth R.
Remember the flash drive cake? That's the one where the customer wanted a photo cake, and so brought in the picture they wanted on a portable thumb drive for the bakery to print out. Instead, the bakery drew an exact replica of the flash drive on the cake! Heh, I LOVE stories like that.
Neatorama: Let's see some geek cred - what are the geekiest cake wrecks you've ever gotten?
Jen: Game console cakes are really popular, especially for grooms cakes, and I've seen some doosies:
Cake submitted by Monique B.
Cake submitted by Diane B.
Here are a few more geeky Wrecks:
Cake submitted by Maggie G.
Cake submitted by Kelly J.
Cake
submitted by Gretchen W. (That's supposed to be Luigi, believe it or not)
And this one's not a Wreck, but I thought it was funny:
Cake submitted by Amy L.
I *think* that says happy birthday in binary. Am I right?
__________
Jen has kind enough to offer a free copy of the book for a giveaway - got any question for Jen? A lucky commenter with the most interesting question will win the book (I'll post Jen's reply as an update).
More wrecktastic blogger interviews with Jen Yates about her new book:
Links: Cake Wrecks | The
Book at Amazon: Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
Update 10/3/09 – Jen has picked the question to answer. Find out more here: Link
If you enjoy delicious-looking cakes or ones that look adorable, this mole rat cake is not for you. If you like the occasional bizarre and unusual cake on the other hand, than you might join me in saluting this monster treat. I have to wonder if the cake inside is red velvet with raspberry filling to help make it even more disturbing.
Link Via Ugly Overload
Cake Wrecks causes me to cringe all of the time, usually at gross spelling errors and colors that should never be used on a cake. But when one actually makes me laugh out loud, I know I have to share it with you guys.
It’s bad, right? And the one paw appears to have six digits on it. In case you don’t know what the UK logo looks like, click the link. You’ll be stunned at the similarity.
Cake Wrecks, the blog devoted to photos of mistakes in cakes, has been featured on Neatorama in the past.
But with the Super Bowl imminent, this seemed like an appropriate moment to take another look at some sports-related cake atrocities.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
