"Cake Wrecks" news and stories

We've long been fans of Jen Yates' fantastically funny food blog, Cake Wrecks, so we were mighty pleased to find the she's finally assembled enough disastrous misspellings, ill-conceived concept cakes and just downright nasty icing snafus to fill a whole book, "Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong."

Also on bookshelves this month, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley's "This Is Why You're Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks."

See our favorites from both tomes after the jump.

Young green strawberry. Photo: tanakawho, Flickr.

• Ontario farmers beat the heat challenge and find a way to grow fresh, sweet strawberries until first frost.
• "Mud to Mouth" takes 6 acres of donated farm land and shows students where food comes from.
• After financial woes, Jamie Kennedy sells the Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar.
• Toronto's Recipe for Community hopes to bring generations together and rebuild the community of Alexandra Park.
• A talk with Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks, and how her blog has become a book.
• September 24th marked the 250th anniversary of Guinness.
• Wine critic Gord Stimmel's global values cover Italy, California, South Africa, Spain and Australia.
• Recipes: Coconut Curry, Chicken and Corn Chowder, Grilled Tomato Vinaigrette Chicken, Turkish Beet Salad.

My wife, who generally avoids anything related to baking, recently showed me a hidden side of her personality. Although she doesn't like to bake, she apparently finds endless joy in the world of bizarre and/or ill-conceived confectionary. Having begun with a mild addiction to Cake Wrecks, she has progressed to ever-more-advanced levels of culinary schadenfreude. And so it is that I now find myself receiving regular e-mails ordering me to check out bizarre food sites.

In a recent e-mail, my wife sent me to a site that features one woman's experiment with risqué cupcakes. Having seen more than my fair share of poorly-executed erotic confectionary, not to mention South Carolina's famous Gaffney Butt water tower, I thought that I had grown jaded. I imagined that nothing could impress me, and that attempts at rendering the nude human form in sugar and frosting were hopeless.

I was wrong.

While I would caution that these cupcakes aren't for everyone, I think that they were very nicely rendered. If you are of an adventurous bent, I strongly advise you to wait until your boss leaves the room, then direct your browser to the Brownie Points website. Enjoy!

Cake Wrecks features cakes that people have actually paid for that have turned out less than stellar. I am glad of the blog's stance to not mock home bakers as I've certainly made some regrettable looking creations, but if I'm going to pay for something, I would expect it to look good.

As for the cake in this picture, the blog offers no explanation. However, the commenters came though. One commenter, Jen, pointed out that the characters say "Happy Birthday" in traditional Chinese and another commenter, Tom, said, "A little pile of poo is a good luck symbol in Japan." It seems that there is an explanation for everything.

Check out Cake Wrecks for more cake disasters that you can't help but stare at.

[Via Marijean of STLWorkingMom]