Cakewrecks

On Thursday, November 5, Miriam and I met up to attend an author presentation at Barnes and Noble. The speaker was none other than Jen Yates, the creator of the hilarious blog Cakewrecks! Jen recently authored a book by the same name, depicting many of the wrecks, with anecdotes and bits of humor. She and her husband John are in the process of a book tour around the country. Miriam and I were wicked early, which meant we got actual seats.
We also had ample time to look at the "wreckplicas" of cake wrecks--mini cakes or cupcakes intentionally decorated to look like ugly cakes featured on the website. Here is one example:

For each stop on the tour, local professional bakers bake and decorate cakes for the audience to eat after the talk. Often, these cakes pay homage to wrecks on the website, either specific wrecks, or the genre.
The other cake baked by Fancy Cakes had a back-story. Jen and John had called the bakery to ask them to do a cake for the signing. Leslie at Fancy Cakes said, "oh, Cake Wrecks! One of our cakes was on that site." Whoops... It was a rather well-made cake, featuring Obama. The only objection came from his "awkward hand placement."

Leslie, who was there at the event, joked that they "dusted off the cake" to bring it to the signing. I assumed she was kidding, and had baked a copy of the cake for the occasion. When we got close to the cake after the talk, I saw that it was, indeed, dusty. Ew.

Anyways, Jen and John were quite funny--they had us laughing really hard. What I liked about them was that they seemed like regular people--a little geeky, a little awkward in an endearing way, and not afraid to laugh at themselves. Jen's mic kept making terrible noises, so there was much laughing about that.

They showed a slide show of some of their favorite wrecks, and told us how the blog started. After a few odd questions from the audience, we ate some delicious almond cake and waited for a long time for Miriam to get her book signed. Meeting them was comfortable and fun, and I got the sense that they were genuinely pleased that we were there.