The Letter Of the Flaw
April 22, 2013 This redditor discovered there's more than one way to interpret "sprinkles on the side."
;)
Ha!
Dae's local bakery offers number-shaped donuts for birthdays, so she ordered "20 number 6 donuts with pink icing and sprinkles."
;)
Oooh. SO CLOSE.
Cory S. asked for a cake that was half white, half chocolate, but made the mistake of not specifying WHICH half:
;)
Er...
;)
I feel ya, Jean-Luc.
And finally, Lindsay A. was very clear when she ordered these two cookies cakes: "Happy Birthday Jessica" on one, and on the other, "Happy Birthday Alan."
;)
(I'll spare you the headache: they both read "Happy Birthday Jessica and the other Alan.")
Annnnd....
;)
DOUBLE FACEPALM!
Thanks to Libby, Dae S., Cory S., & Lindsay A., who I'm sure can't stop staring at the wonky Picard arm, either. Right? Please tell me I'm not the only one.
Reader Comments (71)
I LOVE the face palms!!!
If you go to one of those fancy cupcake stores they roll the cupcakes in the sprinkles like that. As for those last two cakes BWAHAHAHAHA
Skin cake: White dermis,
chocolate hypodermis, and
epidermis ice.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but I actually think the split cake looks pretty good. Or maybe I just haven't had breakfast yet. Either one.
I didn't see the wonky arm until you mentioned it. Now it's all I see. Argh!
Sung to Frere Jacques
Roll on sprinkles, roll on sprinkles
Pipe 6 on, pipe 6 on
Stack white on the chocolate, stack white on the chocolate
Face palm, Jean. Face palm, Jean.
"Other Alan," "Other Alan"
Blames his mom, blames his mom
Jean Luc's arm is creepy, Riker's feeling weepy
More face palm. More face palm.
By the bye, happy Irth Day to Jen and John!
Face, the final frontier. These are the purchases of average bakery customers. Their continuing mission; to explore strange interpretations of their orders, to seek out merely acceptable celebratory pastries and Alan’s own damn birthday cookie, to boldly hope for baked goods that aren’t wrecks...
I think the chocolate/white layer cake is a lot more logical than what the client was ordering -- was the baker supposed to make two cakes, line them up, and ice them hoping they'd look like one cake (and we know how likely that'd be), or pour two batters in the pan and hope they'd stay to their respective sides? I call "not a wreck" on this one. Plus it looks like it was a pretty, if undistinguished, cake before it was sliced up. Tasty, too!
It's actually common for bakeries to make a cake half and half in flavor. There's a separator you can use (or just a piece of foil works) in the pan. Once baked, remove the separator and voila! :D I could be wrong, but I think you can even remove the separator before baking. I haven't done it in a Loooooong time, so I'd have to look into that...
Anyhow, I love the sprinkles on the side. Literal much?
Sharyn and SuBee ~ you ladies totally made my Monday morning! Thanks for that!
Of course, now all I can look at is that wonky arm! o.O Thanks for that Jen!
Wendy, you can remove the separator before baking with no problem. Cake batter is viscus enough to not mix once already in the pan while it bakes, this is why marbled cakes work. We do need to keep in mind that even if a baker did that they could still stack them to end up looking like the cake in the picture but now bottom-top/top-bottom so I'm not sure it would fix the situation.
Haiku joy and Sharyn I am now in hysterics, thanks :D
The 3rd cake is a !/4 sheet cake double layer and thats the only way you can do half chocolate and half yellow. We won't cut the cake and half and try to do it the other way and its too messy and the cake comes out uneven. So it's really the customers fault on that one.
Also most bakeries if not all of them DON'T make the cake there it comes in frozen in either 8" rounds of 1/4 sheets. So you can put to 1/4 together to make a 1/2 side by side and it works perfectly fine but the customer probably didn't want a 1/2.
Wonky arm or not, Jean Luc is perfect in every way. Le sigh...
I also call "not a wreck" on the half and half cake. I'm not a pro baker, but I've bought a lot of cakes from pro bakeries in my time, and that seems pretty much THE standard way to do a half-and-half layer cake. It's what people ordering a "half and half" layer cake generally want and expect. Looks to me like the bakery did a great job on that cake. A half and half SHEET cake, on the other hand, you would expect to be one side all chocolate and one side all yellow, so you can cut and serve people their choice of cake flavor.
Poor Alan. I hope he gets his own cookie next year!
So...what am I missing on the half white/half chocolate cake? Help me fellow wreckers and explain or it'll niggle me all day!
The half and half cake looks delicious, but is a problem if someone who doesn't like or can't eat chocolate is in the crowd of people planning to eat it. Then, yeah, face palm....
I must have a promising future as a wreckerator, because I can't say for certain I wouldn't have done the same things for #1 and #3. I, for one, blame my upbringing on Amelia Bedelia books!
"Who is Number One!"
"You are number Six."
With pink-and-blue frosting and sprinkles.
I AM NOT A NUMBER (With pink-and-blue frosting and sprinkles)!!!!
Either the coffee hasn't kicked in yet or I'm just an ignorant sl**** but what is a "number 6" doughnut?
Thanks Jen - didn't notice Picards arm either....until you mentioned it. Are there cakes in today's post??
Really, stacking cakes in two flavours isn't that difficult....The grocery store bakery at which I (VERY briefly) worked did not bake on site, but we could split two different flavour 1/4 slab's and then cut in half to make one end of the cake vanilla & the other end chocolate with both being two layers. It just meant that the other layer of each made a half/half for the counter, or another custom order.
Cake #3: I can relate. I once phoned in an order for a large pizza, half mushroom and half pepperoni. When I picked it up, one half was plain and the other half had both mushroom and pepperoni. When I complained, they blamed me for not specifically saying I wanted the toppings on different halves.
@Ms anthrope: They said above that the bakery sold birthday donuts made in the shape of numbers. A "number 6 donut" would be a donut shaped like the number 6.
A number two doughnut - it has to be brown icing on that one, huh?
*guttermind*
@HeatherA: I agree Jean Luke is wonderful and I'd still love him even if he really had a wonky arm.
As it is I can't figure out the arm without blaming it on photoshop... But I don't know, I'm no expert! :)
After a long, tedious shift at work, these cakes, accompanied by Jen's commentary and Sharyn's impeccable song parody, were exactly what I needed. Thanks! :)
Jen, the cupcakes in picture one are very likely from Crumbs Bake Shop. It's their signature to do sprinkles or other topping around the side: http://www.crumbs.com/signature-cupcakes.html
So, really not a wreck. Delicious, though.
@ Crissy: I'm sorry, but #3 is not the customer's fault. I have three kids, and always have to order half chocolate/half yellow (or white) for birthdays and parties because my oldest daughter doesn't eat chocolate (though my son and youngest daughter love it and always request it). I have NEVER had to explain to any baker (and I've gone to quite a few) about what I mean by "half and half." They always know the proper way to do a half and half cake without any clarification on the customer's part. Obviously, #3 baker didn't know what s/he was doing. It's still a nice cake and I personally don't have a problem with it, but the mass majority (90 percent) of bakers know what it means when the customer says "half and half"--and that ain't no true half and half cake, baby.
Anyway, I'm still laughing at #1. Genius!
@SuBee: Perhaps Enterprise is no longer travelling in mere space. Perhaps they have unwittingly moved into another dimension...There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as vacuous as a wreckerator. It is the ground at the far end between request and repugnance, between desire and desolation, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his inability. This is the dimension of wreckeration. It is an area which we call the Facepalm Zone.
Double facepalm all the way
'Cross the sky
Yeah yeaaaaaaah
Double facepalm
Seeing the wonky Picard arm just makes this post even sweeter!! Thanks for pointing it out!! LOL :D
If you order a pizza saying I want half mushroom and pepperoni, that sounds like one side. You have to say half mushroom, half pepperoni. Big difference.
Here's what I don't understand about the doughnut mistake...if the bakery specializes in making doughnuts that look like numbers then how on earth could this mistake have happened? I could understand if it was a special order that no one had ever suggested before but if this is a "thing" that the bakery does then it is the stupidest mistake ever.
Is that Picard-Odo in that last picture.... his arm looks...alittle... strreeettched.
Speaking of Alan, Alan, Alan, surely I can't be the only one that thinks of this video .....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgvR3y5JCXg
:-)
I tried to read those cookie cakes for like 60 seconds before noticing you translated them in the caption. LOL
I agree, the "half and half" one is not a wreck. I used to work in a bakery for a local grocery store (one that is VERY rarely seen on here) and that is what is half and half. I have NEVER seen it done any other way in any bakery, and that's what they would get if they ordered one from me. Unless the person who ordered this specified that they didn't want a layer of chocolate, and one white, this "mistake" is on them.
Having worked at a locally owned, all baking done on site kind of bakery, our cake decorators would never have done a sheet cake with one side chocolate and the other white. You run the risk of the cake splitting down the middle. If a customer wanted two different flavors we'd tell them to get two separate cakes.
Now I'm picturing Picard and the kids climbing the turbolift in "Disaster" singing Sharyn's version of the song.
@BADKarma - nice "Prisoner" reference!
Also, what happened to Original Alan's cookie cake? I mean, both of these were for Jessica and the "other Alan".
Thank you so much for pointing out the weird Picard arm. I was staring at it and had to make myself look away to read the end of the post.
You have added Star Trek: Next Generation to CakeWrecks. You have vastly elevated your hero status with me! And I don't care if Jean-Luc DOES have a wonky arm.
If I ordered half and half cake of 2 flavors, I would expect to get one on one side and one on the other. I've had to suffer through too many white cakes because someone couldn't eat chocolate. The cake above doesn't help the situation.
OK, Alenxa, I am now going to have that episode stuck in my head all night. I hope I don't get claustrophobic.
What's wrong with his arm? I don't see it! What's wrong with his arm?
@Just Andrea, I already had to change the music in my head from
"OOOH OOOH OOOH OOH OOH OOH OOOOH..." (original Star Trek) to
"Bum ba da bum ba da bum..."(Next Generation.)
Now I have to turn that off and turn on "Do Do Do Do, Do Do Do Do..."
Not to mention the fact that The Facepalm Zone is a very, very scary place.
As a kid, I went to many birthday parties where half the cake was white and the other half was chocolate. It was pretty customary, in fact. What they got in that picture is NOT what I would expect if I ordered half and half. Definitely not the customer's fault.
I'm heading to the bunker with my dozen chocolate cupcakes and dozen white cupcakes. Y'all can cut 'em in half and lay 'em side by side or one on top of the other, if you want!
A bad photoshop to go with the bad cakes. Nice choice. :)
I'd like to know whether the nickname 'the other Alan' stuck