Professional & Technical

I am not a professional reviewer but I know what I like. I think it is sad when our expectations are so low that we think a cake decorating disaster book is good reading. I guess if you are into Beavis and Butthead or some other low brow humor, you will think it is ok to laugh at juvenile disasters and cakes with sexual innunendo humor. Considering what you see on their blog, it would be cheaper to read that since it is free. My opinion and I am sticking with it.
Rating: 1 / 5

Some of the pictures and captions are very funny but I would not have purchased this book if I had known that some of the pictures are pretty explicit.
Rating: 3 / 5

Looked like an interesting book when I saw it on the shelf, which it is. However it’s not as funny or more specifically the cakes aren’t as funny as I had anticipated them being and none reached the level of hilariously wrong as the title tells us. What it really needs is better material (the cakes). Granted it’s possible that this is as bad as the stuff ups in the real world actually get, then maybe urban legends that have been told. What Cake Wrecks is, is a number of different cakes where the baker or the customer has stuffed up with misspellings, left out words, included the instructions which were obviously written in the space where you write exactly what will appear on the icing such as the one on the cover which included the words underneath (without the h) that. Some the planning of how much space was needed to fit the words on the area they were meant to wasn’t done properly, some by their design or icing colour used unintentionally resemble human waste or human private parts, and some well the author just thought didn’t look good.

Each entry is accompanied by commentary from the author, the type of which reminded me a lot of that which my mum and her generation of female friends use and people my age just don’t really find that funny. If you’re of the baby boomer generation you may find the commentary a bit funnier than if you’re from either a younger age or you are of the male gender.

Being that these cakes are taken from a website by the same author and are submitted by the public there is firstly no guarantee that these were actually professionally made stuff ups and not just something people made themselves then submitted to the website/book to get published and enjoy their little bit of fame. Secondly the photograph quality of a lot of the cakes inside the book isn’t always the clearest. This is fine for an amateur public submitted website where the page administrators obviously don’t want to interfere with the submitters photos, but a bit of work editing the images by increasing sharpness and brightness could have been done by either the authors or the publishers before publishing them in a hard copy book.

Quite a heavy book too I might add. It’s definitely one you probably want to flick through in a physical store first or borrow from your library before purchasing unseen online.

Rating: 3 / 5