See, his stripes actually look like zebra stripes. Which is fortunate, since he is, in fact, a zebra.
Ask for zebra stripes on your cake, however, and there's no telling what you'll get. Maybe Jim's "huuuge pointy teeth!" model:
(Yes, she really did have to tell me this is the number 30. How embarrassing.)Then there's Kristen N.'s post-modern, depressed zebra stripes:
(Why depressed? Because it's a little blue, of course.)And then, the really lucky ones get a little of Beth P.'s airbrush action:
Ah. Such skill. Such attention to detail. Such...airbrushiness.But the really, really lucky ones get a shell-less albino turtle covered in gills:
Ha! Just kidding! Those stripes are way too good.
Kayla U., maybe your baker was trying to make the majestic zebra turtle. Eh?
- Related Wreckage: Monkey See, Monkey Doo-Doo
- Related Wreckage: Monkey See, Monkey Doo-Doo
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That last one is very, very sad. Poor albino turtle.
PS You're killing me with the Python references!
I couldn't tell that was a '30' either.
And what the heck is the last one?(besides an albino zebra turtle of course)
Thanks for telling me that was a 30. I was cocking my head in all directions trying to figure it out.
Dang, my eyes hurt. It's like those optical illusion pictures... with no pictures.
The stripes on the blue cake look like crazy centipede type creatures, disco dancing...
what the what?!?
i cna hrdddaly ssssee to tyypp nyw.
aside from all that stripey wreckiness (!!!) ... again, what's with the cake sharing?! i think peeps deserve their v. own birthday cake.
as far as mr. zebra himself, awwwwwww!!! i LERVE him! too cute!
Ahahahaha!
I think Christina B.'s "30" cake looks just like a diagram of muscle cells. Click on my name to see . . .
Oh my word.... and the word is YIKES!
Are you sure that's a turtle and not the rare, zebra-striped prehistoric manatee?
I like that last one. Looks like it was made with… you know, longing. Made by a person really longed to see a zebra. Perhaps because they'd only heard of them by rough description.
Wow, that is such a bad idea for a cake,who would want an animal print cake anyway ? yueche! By the way is that baby called Cambria? if so its latin for Wales.Why would anyone do that to a child, dont get me wrong now, we live in Wales,and gave welsh language names to all our children. but its not a personal name!
well, now I know what not to order at the bakery.
That last one CANNOT be a professional cake!
Is that baby's name Cambia? Odd.
Any attempt at a brown striped zebra is going to look like diarrhea, that's a fact.
I had no idea it was a 30 either. The pattern going across both numbers blends them into one wreckful blob.
A very close friend of the family has offered to make our wedding cake. Although she is a retired baker, after much time on this website, I've decided to make our wedding cake very simple (and hopefully foolproof).
Having said that, I'm definitely asking for a "wreck" cake for the shower.
Hey, that is a "30"! I thought it was a splayed out "zebra" hide with the tail cut out.
Are we sure the last one isn't the extremely rare Majestic Turtle-headed, Zebra-striped Cat? (Scientific name: Wreckius horrificus) After all, it's extremely difficult in this day and age to find AN ACTUAL PICTURE OF A ZEBRA!
Andrea S. (wreck-porter in training)
wv: drasie The cake is such a wreck 'cause she couldn't drasie?
Back-to-back days with Monty Python references! I like it! Go for three!
the blue one looks like it's covered in leeches.
Forget the horrifying cakes; bring on more of the Cheetos-loving zebra! He's awesome.
Is that albino turtle cake extremely poorly frosted as well? It looks as if there's hardly any frosting on it in places and that you can practically see the cake through it.
Or is that just some brown frosting mixed in there to show how "dirty" the turtle is?
That poor kid--her parents will probably make her childhood a misery by referring to their marriage before she arrived as the "Pre-Cambrian Era". Even worse if they are paleontologists! Shame, though, because it is a pretty name for a beautiful country.
I did get the 30 but couldn't for the life of me read the names on it. Still no idea what they are.
No...seriously....what the heck is that last one SUPPOSED to be? I'm at a loss....
Heh, even with you SAYING it was a 30, it took me a bit to see it.
"What? Does she mean a thirty on the cake? I think I see a zero [which was actually the hole/center/whatever of the real zero], but where's the three? And what's with that side of the cake? Did someone eat part of it? OH! Okay, 30!"
Albino turtle....So funny! You crack me up. Thanks!
As I chuckle over the albino turtle comment, my four year old comes over to see! I say...
"that's supposed to be a zebra...does that look like a zebra?" "No!!!!" She replys with a laugh..."that's a turtle with stripes!!"
Is it bad if I actually like the first one and the blue one - of course, with the caveat if it's not supposed to be a zebra cake and just a few random designs. As zebra stripes, they're pretty bad - random, abstract art - pretty.
Honey, I'm pretty sure this is NOT Bethesda. Are you sure I can't roll down the window and ask for directions?
That last one is SAD. Have they ever seen a zebra? Do they know it looks like a horse and not a turtle? The fish gills are pathetic attempts at stripes. If they wanted to do gills, stick to a few by the neck, people! I think I can even see the cake through the icing. was it smeared off? did they run out and have to spread it REALLY thin? PA-THE-TIC!
but you have to love these wreckerators inventing new animal breeds. The shell-less albino gilled turtle is right up there with the majestic coiled craphound and oh, so many others!
Check out today's Washington Post. Your signing in Bethesda is mentioned, even if the article isn't really about you so much.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111602187.html
Some Cake Wrecks are obviously the result of someone attempting something that's just too hard for them, and some are inexplicable (Cupcake Critters), but maybe the most intriguing ones are where someone utterly fails at doing something that ought to be very easy. "Paint some zebra stripes on a cake." "Write the word 'Birthday'". How do some people manage to find their way to work at all?
And that sad excuse for a 30! (I had to study it to see it.) But why are people choosing zebra stripes for 30 year old and 1 year old girl birthdays? Unless, the cake of poor baby "Embia" was attacked by an out-of-control airbrush (what DID it think it was doing??)
And why does Brendi and Lindsey's 30 cake look like a mass of muscle tissue?
http://www.botany.uwc.ac.za/sci_ed/grade10/mammal/muscle.htm#smooth
I can't decide if the tooth cake looks like Kat's name is being attacked by black slugs or if her name is magnetic (thinking of middle school science project here) or what. Oh never mind.
The third cake is actually kind of pretty, except for the mismatched green border. But the blue and brown is nice. No room to write anything so it's a bit of a pointless cake and certainly NOT zebra stripes, but kinda cool in a modern way.
HAHAHAHHAHHAHAAHHHHAAAA!!!! That last one's face/head/whatever!!!!
Somebody needs to tell the baker of the last one that zebras have hooves, not paws.
Was that first picture of a live animal a zonkey?!?
The 30 cake made my head spin, I had to look away. And the blue one reminds me of murderous vines encasing the cake, like from some sort of horrible fantasy story. Nightmarish!
@ diddleymaz
Surely you must have observed by now that reason, logic, and taste do not always enter the picture when people are naming their children? We should be fair though--who knows what the kid is actually named...wrecks may or may not represent reality.
If you're looking to kill some time laughing your tail off and fearing for humanity, google "baby has a bad bad name". :)
WTF??? The last one looks like a turtle-headed, dock-tailed westie with black low-lights.
YOUR zebra pic is waaay cute.
Whoa... Marli you are right!
A muscle-bound, borderless, hard to see #30 it is!
WTH is that weird albino Zebra turtle actually supposed to be? I mean... the head and the tail ARE kinda turtle looking... but the feet? The color? The stripes? weird.
And surely the airbrushed mess is just supposed to be ugly stripes, right?
Also what is up with that insane shade of blue covered in brown poos?
Oops. 11:59 anony is "--kate". I know you guys hate true anons. :)
Oh yeah, now I see it - thirty. A three and a zero. I thought at first it was a mini-toilet plunger dropped on a zebra skin rug, and couldn't get the reference.
wv: tubicant
Tubicantid with you, I miss a lot of the MP references, anyway.
The albino turtle may not be a very good zebra, but I have to admit that I find it absolutely adorable. Look at that happy expression in its face as it gambols along! Charming and very cute if not-a-zebra.
Compared to the last four, that first cake can hardly be classified as a wreck. I think that I just might have guessed those were an attempt at zebra stripes without being told. Maybe. If there was a zoo theme to the party, or something. But the rest? No way.
Have these people never seen even a photo of a zebra? good heavens.
"A little blue"
ba-dum-dum!
"Thank you folks, I'll be here all week!"
*groan*.... that one was REALLY, really BAD Jen. Really.
But I still laughed.
wow, amazing, you have to be pretty talented to get them to look that bad
I like the blue zebra cake. Although, it looks more like a painting than a cake I'd want to eat.
Saw you guys at the book signing in Atlanta a week ago! Good times!
Dude, the 30-year-old cake looks EXACTLY like a black and white version of muscle cells! Crazy.
ha ha ha! that is SOOOO funny!
Maybe some things are just not meant to be recreated in icing.
Wow, those are some pretty awful cakes. I'd probably still eat them all, though!
None of those remotely resemble a zebra. Do bakers have access to Google???
~Amy B.
To Abby Normal,
Nice Firefly reference. ;o) I agree the baker had only heard of zebras by rough description. I wonder if every outer planet outpost has a similar zebra cake?
I agree that those are poor, sad excuses for zebra stripes, or zebras. As for the name Cambria, there is also a town in California by that name, and I know of a couple of young ladies that have that name, and they love it. There are, of course, perfectly "acceptable" nicknames - Cam or Camie. I think the name is kind of pretty, and the town itself (here in CA) is pretty.
Tara
The 30 cake makes me dizzy. It's like, hypnotic. (In mesmerizing voice): "You really aren't 30. It's just an illusion. You will be 29 forever. I promise."
Zebra stripes on a baby's cake are bad enough, but those eighties flashback airbrush ones are traumatic.
My daughter had a zebra print birthday cake this year, luckily it didn't look anything like these!
Thanks for pointing out that it's a 30-- at first, I thought it was some kind of carcass. Which explains the muscle tissue...well, almost.
So do zebras now come in pinstripes?
And have you met Cambria's younger sibling, Carboniferous?
Holy zebra-- I mean cow. No words to say. The blue one isn't too bad-- not at all zebra like, but in it's own creative way makes a pretty Vera Bradleyish cake (maybe).
i think the blue one kinda looks like long chiuaua poops with hair. i know it sounds wrong, but just look at it my way for a sec. common now, u do see it don't you? and that poor poor turtle!!! i collect turtles and i am still trying to figure out how to show this pic to my friends without offending every last one of them =)
You showed us a real zebra Jen, as a preface to the post, but check out his wrecky counterpart:
http://www.greenprophet.com/2009/10/15/12727/donkey-zebra/
I think I must be losing my mind, because I didn't think the first one was all that bad. I'm with everyone else on the 30 cake, though. Would've never noticed that was what it was if it hadn't been pointed out to me.
You CAN do a zebra cake and make it look good.
Exhibit A.
http://www.toppartyideas.com/images/BridalShower/PinkZebraCake_333x250.jpg
Exhibit B.
http://colinacakecreations.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/Zebra_Cake.10875444.JPG
Exhibit C.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_faTXNcSN2iw/SaQykdoRKrI/AAAAAAAAA78/8tuX6c3nyg0/s400/zebra+cake.jpg
Am I the only one that thought the actual zebra didn't look quite real? Seriously, I had to stare at that thing for awhile. What's not right with it?
I kinda like the blue one...
but the rest are sad
have you seen that commercial of a video? its a guy and he goes (holding up a pretty cake photo) "this was how the cake was suppose to look like" then he shows the wreck. then he shows his wife all mad at him
@ Mina:
The first one is my cake. I asked specifically for zebra stripes nd i got a cake tht looks like the words were thrown thru a black window. my fav. animal is a zebra so thts wat i wanted for my 14th birthday cake. but i did specifically ask for zebra stripes
Anna, you're not losing your mind, because I thought the first cake wasn't that bad either. The handwriting is nice and everything is spelled correctly. The zebra print is not that seizure-inducing.
But that 30 cake and the Cambia one, that gave me a headache looking at them.
The primary meaning of "Cambria" to me is the small town on California's central coast, near Hearst Castle. It's a pretty town, it's a pretty name, and I have no categorical objection to place names used as personal names.
But on that cake there? No R. The baby's name is either Cambia or Eambia. Either of which is just weird. Or, of course, the baby's name *is* Cambria, but the wreckerator misspelled it. Which might explain why she then vigorously crossed out the inscription with black airbrushing.
At least, that's more or less what my kindergartener does when she makes a writing error.
The albino shell-less turtle was priceless! At least, I hope they didn't have to pay for it!
-Julie
The second cake makes my eyes water if I look at it too long.
Thanks so much for filling us in on the "30" I was thinking "Turn it sidways, maybe it's a Zebra's butt with a big hole for the....well you know.... tail to go ;-)"
And the last one, perhaps in her land zebras look just like turtles.
Me too didn't notice that its 30 haha. It doesn't look like the real thing lolz.
Summer
A Writers Den
Brown Mestizo
I had to be a nag, but there were some who called the wizard, 'Tim'.
I'm kind of relieved to see that I'm not the only one who liked the blue cake.
As for the baby's name, it looked like Barbie to me.
I made a Zebra cake for my brother's girlfriend's birthday... It was just not my day though, It was too hot and my buttercream melted off the darn cake, the ganache i used for the stripes wouldn't emulsify properly, and I didn't have the coloring I wanted... I thought it was sad but she loved it.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30986384&l=24eae62f43&id=55201889
Yeesh. And I thought there was no possible way to make animal prints look any more tacky . . .
I'm glad to read the comments and see I'm not the only one who thought "leeches" or slugs on the cakes.
The "30" cake looks like an MC Escher bird/fish illusion. I think that last one is a birthday cake for a resident of the Island of Dr Moreau.
The one cake looked like a closeup of a muscle specimen..
I couldn't tell it was a "30"... honestly, I thought it was a zebra striped flat, whole chicken with a whole for some reason... turns out the hole was the middle of the 0, oops..
I asked my two year old if that last one looked like a zebra and she said "no, looks like a tiger" ahahahah out of the mouth of babes. =)
referring to the first picture.....why i could just roll down that window and pop a cheeto in your cute little mouth.
i cannot make sense of turtle zebra.
The blue one looks like it has slugs on it.
I know there've been some comparisons of the 30 cake to muscle cells, but in a conversational Mobius loop, they also bear a striking resemblance to the cells in some slices of visual cortex.
I kinda like the blue cake...
or I could be colorblind. :D
No, the blue one is cool.
Love the zebra!
But that baby's name? The wrecky writing isn't helping here, but I keep thinking it says Cambio, like the Spanish for change. You know, they wanted a different one.
I can never get my head round people giving their children bizarre names with wacky spelling.
creative call, denestria! and stephanie, your cake looked better than ALL of these!
I think the baby's name is Barbia.
I love the last one, the happiest zebra turtle in the world is almost as good as the giraffe cake from ages ago.
WV: mednesse. That these cakes are made by professionals is total mednesse
This one seems a trifle unfair. Zebra stripes are just not going to look good in any circumstances.
The second one ("30") looked like a zebra skin rug to me. ^_^
Poor little Larmbia looks like she's already seen the other side of the cake, and is not pleased!
The horribly airbrushed first birthday cake is my post.
For clarification: my daughter's name is Cambria; & I was unaware until now that whoever wrote it on the cake left out the "R".
Double wreck? :/
YAYS! you put up my Blue Zebra cake of EPIC FAIL!
thankies~ XD
oh and people, PLEASE PLEASE NO ANIMAL PRINTS ON CAKE ORDERS. Take in to consideration, time constraints and decorator's abilities when ordering cakes that may very well end up here~
Thank you again~ I got a kick out of the comments here, XD
A 30? Where?
And I am offended by the whole blue-zebra-stripe thing. My horseback riding helmet cover happens to be blue zebra. Just making a statement. You know how it goes. Ending up in the show ring in blue zebra stripes...
[Mum yelling name and gesturing frantically] "Oh, crap, her helmet cover is still on! AGH!"
[Rider confused; falls off horse. Mum hides face in hands] "I don't know her... Just some random kid..."
[Trainer groans] "Reeal good first impression, kid. What? No! Of course I'm not upset. You were only ONE FREAKING RIBBON away from qualifying for Nationals. Upset? Who, me? No way! How could I be?" [Trainer faints from the weight of such heavy lies]
(No, this has never happened to me. This is why I change my helmet cover AT HOME before shows, and also why I bring my extremely sane, sensible, levelheaded, and attentive dad to shows rather than my mum.)
The #30 cake is almost like a Kevin Smith Movie moment..I couldn't see the 'Sailboat'