PSA
Hey everybody! Just your friendly neighborhood grocery store bakery cake decorator here! Boy, that was a mouthful. Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you spend your evenings with your mouth agape in amazement while watching TV shows about cake decorating and think “Why not me? I want a cake like that!!!” Please do not seek a cake like this out at a grocery store bakery. It’s not that we probably couldn’t do it if given the time, but chances are strong that not only do we not have the time to do cakes like those (Duff and Company spend days on those cakes) but we don’t have the resources. We are employed as cake decorators because we make passable commercial cakes. We are paid less than we should be paid and expected to turn out as many cakes as possible in a small amount of time. Therefore, quality tends to suffer. There is a whole website dedicated to the suffering of cake quality which you can find here http://www.cakewrecks.com. As someone who is normally not responsible for the special order cakes, I do the very best I can with the resources I am given. I am not always happy with the cakes I make either. To summarize, There is nothing wrong with getting your cake at the grocery store bakery, but just remember, when you are dreaming of topsy turvy layers and beautiful ornate detailing…. that you are getting your cake at the grocery store bakery.
Thank you.
PS: I’m sorry we can’t make a zillion cakes before noon on a saturday. That’s just the way it goes.
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Really I didn’t do that bad. 11/12 of my cake orders looked awesome. There was one I wasn’t completely happy with and wouldn’t you know it? the lady wasn’t happy with it either. Course, when I asked her if she liked it, she said Yes but came back after I left to ask for a discount cause my writing wasn’t evenly spaced. She literally wanted 36 names written on this cake. Whatever. I made another cake that was picked up after that where the lady beamed with excitement over the way her cake turned out. Now THAT is the kind of reaction that keeps me in this gig. All the local highschools have their graduations this weekend. So this is basically like Hell Week for the cake decorators. Can I get sick please?
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I’ve seen your cakes and I think they’re awesome. Anyone should be thrilled to have a cake made by you. 36 names on a cake is freaking ridiculous if you ask me. If anyone asked for that around here they’d be laughed at.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:47 am
I guess it’d be too morbid to explain that you couldn’t put all the names on the cake because it’s common–nay, expected!–for students to get stupid at this time of year and to do something which prevents one/some/several from walking across the stage and/or sharing in the cake?