Let Them Eat Cake!

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 has exploded.

"...And underneath that, write 'We will miss you'. Got it?"
Oh yeah, they got it.

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.

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.

Allusion: 

Allusion is a great rhetorical tool for immediately laying a common foundation and context between author and reader. Yates applies this technique often, using that context to give her posts added hilarity by uniting common pop culture with badly decorated cakes.

The allusory undertones serve to tie together a collection of Cake Wreck photos that otherwise have no uniting factor. Yates tends to group her cakes together through either similar mistakes or similar occasions, but using an illusion gives her a tool to put together a post with completely random cakes while still giving her audience a united and smooth read. Then, every cake and caption builds off the last instead of existing as random snippets. It adds to the context, making it a journey of hilarity instead of snapshots of funny.

In the post “Far Side of the Wreck” uses a Far Side author Gary Larson-esque voice to create esoteric and dryly clever captions. Jen starts the post with a quick background, bringing up images of her as a child curled up with a Far Side anthology, growing up on the bizarre comics that she claims heavily influenced her sense of humor. The story immediately makes her more human; this glimpse into her childhood gives her a personable and very human tone. She gains immediate credibility, which only adds more zing to her following captions.

Alone and outnumbered, C3pO did his best to blend in.

Further credibility is added when Yates imitates Gary Larson’s style perfectly, which also gives the allusion more weight. Applying that tone to photos of ridiculously decorated cakes puts each wreck in a different context than simply looking at the photo alone. A picture of several Star Wars cupcakes is seemingly innocuous until the caption “Alone and outnumbered, C3pO did his best to blend in” makes it blaringly obvious that all the other cupcakes have plastic Chewbacca heads pressed into the frosting, while there is only one C3p0 cupcake. Suddenly, the solidarity of the robot head becomes funny because of Yates’ caption and because of the allusion.

Sarcasm: 

Jen Yates is a master of sarcasm. Every post has a little bit in it. In her praises of some of the worst cakes their weaknesses are made more obvious than a techni-colored rainbow cake. Her post “Come on Barbie, Let’s Go Party” starts the same as many, telling a quick story can gives context to the whole post. She begins to talk about those crocheted toilet-paper cover dolls that creepily protected your rolls of toilet-paper from any wandering eye that might be offended at its white, cylindrical shape.

Yates then connects the TP doll to the doll cake, which is just as strange, but more edible. Here the sarcasm become evident. She goes on to praise the great and diverse nature of Barbie doll cakes, giving each a name that is both flatters and points out it’s decorative “wreck-itude.”

The "I'm-A-Little-Teapot"

The "Girls-Shouldn't-Have-ALL-The-Fun"

The sarcasm may seem harsh at times, but Yates does it all in good fun. Besides, who's idea was it anyway to make a Barbie cake out of a Aladdin-like Ken doll?

Dialogue: 


It is often said that in fiction and non-fiction alike it is better to show than tell. Yate’s use of dialogue does just that. By telling a story through two people talking, the audience fills in their own details. It also serves to make a cake funnier by revealing the back story.

Take this wreck:

You may be confused as to why someone would want a cake with a USB drive on it, and a detailed one at that. In fact, besides the bizarre decoration, you may find nothing wrong with the cake. Sure, it’s strange, but well done.

Now, read the dialogue that goes along with it:

[answering phone] "Cakey Cake Bakery, Jill speaking! How can I help you?"


"Hi, I need to order a cake for my boss. We have a photo of him playing golf that we'd like to put on it, though - can you do that?"


"Of course! Just bring the photo in on a USB drive and we'll print it out here."


"Great, I'll bring it by this afternoon."


Later...


"Hey, Jill, what am I putting on this cake?"


"Oh, check the counter; I left the jump drive out for you there."


[calling from the back room] "Really? This is what they want on the cake?"


"Yeah, the customer just brought it in."


"Okey dokey!"


Laughing yet? I am. The story behind the cake is what makes it funny. Once you realize that the decorator completely misunderstood the use of the jump drive, the well-done cake becomes a colossal fail. The dialogue helps the reader to this conclusion instead of simply coming out and saying it. The audience to finds their own context, and that sudden jolt of realization takes the USB cake from strange to funny.

It doesn’t take much to see that Cake Wrecks is funny. Really, the only thing you need to do to be convinced is to go read a couple of posts yourself. And, true, we could go on and on about how and why Yate’s captions make the wrecks funnier by giving them added context, but in the end, is that really why the blog attracts so many readers? Perhaps it is the simple reminder that not everyone is perfect. Don’t deny it: on some level, you revel at the disasters of others because it frees you to also make mistakes. That’s what Cake Wrecks is: a place that frees you to make your own mistakes because, well, at least it wasn’t as bad as that one cake.