Introduction:
Cake. Contained in that one, four-letter word is a myriad of meanings, memories, and magic that nearly everyone can identify with. Cake is a band, hygiene is helped along by cakes of soap, tests are (hopefully) a piece of cake. However, the greatest and most recognizable form of cake is that of the most versatile dessert in the world. Birthday cake, Bundt cake, get-well-soon cake, wedding cake, cupcakes, and on and on and on.
That’s one of the beauties of cake: versatility. Chocolate, yellow, red velvet, white, Devil’s food, carrot. It can be decorated for Halloween, baby showers, Christmas, spring, Mother’s Day, or reunions. You can choose buttercream frosting, royal frosting, fondant, or ganache. Accents could be sprinkles, edible flowers, plastic figures, candles, and photos printed on edible icing-paper with food coloring. Seriously, I could go on making lists and series until next November. Cake, when decorated well, can celebrate anything.
And when it’s decorated badly, it can be highly entertaining.
Enter Jen Yates, mastermind behind food blog phenomenon Cake Wrecks. It all started with one photo, a bakery-ordered cake with badly mangled wording (Best Wishes Suzanne/Under Neat that/We will miss you) that happened to be circulating the viral email track. Yates decided to put it on a blog with a witty caption and since then, the project exploded.
Most of the cakes featured on Cake Wrecks are reader-submitted, meaning that all Yates has to do is sit around, check her email, and then formulate some of the funniest and wittiest commentary on badly-decorated cakes the internet has ever seen. Of course the big draw is the funny photos, but it’s the captions that really make the blog one you will want to visit again and again.
Thesis:
Outside of the overarching rhetorical use of visuals, Jen Yates makes the photographs of badly-decorated cakes even more hilarious through her use of allusion, sarcasm, and dialogue.
Examples:
Allusion – Far Side of the Wreck http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/07/far-side-of-wreck.html
Sarcasm – Come on Barbie, Let’s go Partyhttp://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/02/come-on-barbie-lets-go-party.html
Dialogue – USB Cake http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/01/problem-with-phone-orders.html
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