Cakes gone wrong provide popular pastime
"Cake wreck spotting" has become a popular sport, as evidenced by this photo from Flickr. Can't guess what this cake is supposed to be? It's a turtle.
It’s fun to watch the way the print world and the Internet feed into each other. Most of the time, I read stories about how newspapers are shutting down and books will someday be obsolete because of the Internet. However, Cake Wrecks is an example of a book that was spawned from a blog.
This book would have never existed if it weren’t for the fact that the Cake Wrecks blog got so hugely popular. After the Cake Wrecks blog spawned the Cake Wrecks book, a little print publication called The New York Times wrote about the book and the blog, adding the fuel that now has word of the Cake Wrecks spreading like wildfire. Cake Wrecks started as a blog that featured photos of professionally made cakes gone wrong, now it’s it’s a book available in book stores and on Amazon for less than $10.
Why Cake Wrecks works
You may be wondering how someone could make money on a book that costs less than the fees on faxless payday loans in Kansas, but I think the Cake Wrecks book will be a huge hit. Photos of cakes gone wrong make for a perfect coffee table book. I can definitely picture groups of people who read the New York Times socializing on a cushy sofa and laughing at a photo of a cake that says “Happy Birthday Chris in Orange.”
I am a sucker for the Cake Wrecks that involve wording issues like Chris’s cake, which had only blue decorative icing. However, a lot of the cakes gone wrong are just concoctions that blog/book author Jen Yates finds “unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate — you name it.” I have seen the first section of the Cake Wrecks book, though, and I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I saw the photo of the cake that said the words “I want sprinkles” on it in purple icing.
The circle of cakes
So a blog spawned a book, a book spawned an article, and the article has inspired many to check out the blog and buy the book. I guess books and newspapers aren’t obsolete yet.
Check out photos of cakes gone wrong, including a sweet little number that says “Well come home” and an anniversary cake wishing the couple “the fist of many to come,” at Cake Wrecks. I recommend starting with “Literal LOLs,” and be forewarned that some of the cakes in the “Do you see what I see?” category are a tad alarming, in a bad-frat-party joke sort of way.
