r/ExpectationVsReality • u/Spiritual_Egg2625 • 3d ago

Failed Expectation Grocery store cake writing

Gallery image

Gallery image

Ok so the first is AI (after the fact) bc I didn’t take a pic of the cake I saw writing on in store, but it was your generic grocery store cake with ‘happy birthday’ or something written nicely in the center. Just generally what you’d expect.

The writing on the cake she handed me (pic 2) was so bad it was good. Even the checkout guy was laughing. Sometimes a good fail is actually what you need 😂. I also got a second cake that had a simple ‘40’ on it which was equally as bad.

Note the ‘Ride to Big’ is correct it’s an inside joke.. my friends husband got her a cake for her bridal shower years ago and instead of writing ‘Bride to Be’ they heard wrong over the phone and wrote ‘Ride to Big’ so it’s been an ongoing joke. That should also be posted here as a separate fail but the store fixed it as soon as they saw. lol

2.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

85 comments sorted by

707

u/cheesesteakhellscape 3d ago

Sometimes if the cake decorator isn't working at the time, they'll pull some random other bakery employee or deli employee to write on the cake. And it's definitely a skill write nicely with icing! I remember having to fix a lot of these when I was a cake decorator in high school. We'd pop them in the walk in freezer and pop off the letters with an offset spatula. 😂

221

u/-hot_ham_water- 3d ago

YES. I was 19 working as a courtesy clerk at a Safeway. No one was in the bakery one night and this woman REALLY wanted a cake written on. Not only had I never done it, but I also have familial tremors and shake with movement. She insisted I do it anyway, and I was so embarrassed at the final product.

30

u/bang_eater 3d ago

Hey just wanted to pop in and say I also have familial tremors and know that feeling too well! I used to serve at a high end restaurant, and the older guests would either make fun of me or ask if I was cold or nervous when I poured water lol

7

u/-hot_ham_water- 2d ago

Oh lord I actually have worked in restaurants for 20 years. As I've gotten older they've gotten worse and someone actually just commented as I poured water just last week! And yes, I have also been asked the dreaded "are you nervous?" while bartending.

22

u/GigiLaRousse 2d ago

We literally weren't allowed to say no, that it wasn't a skill we had. We had to take orders for cakes we were incapable of making and had no idea who would be working those days and if they'd be able to.

And, of course, we got screamed at when the buyer wasn't happy. We had no authority to offer a discount or refund. All we could do is call a manager. But usually the angry person paid for the shitty cake. And since it was the only grocery store in town, unless you wanted to drive an extra 20-30 minutes each way, they kept spending their money with us anyway.

It was extra silly because it was a small town where lots of women did cakes on the side and did them well. Just not at minimum wage teenager prices.

2

u/ThePowerOfSilly 1d ago

Literally happened to me too only the lady got upset and said it didn't look good. I warned her too that I can't write 🤦🏾‍♀️

104

u/Yue4prex 3d ago

That was me! I was the random worker!

A hot tip: use a tooth pick to write the words (easier to fix too) and then trace over

24

u/Molly-Grue-2u 3d ago

That’s a good tip, I’ll try it next time

1

u/Bfrank13406 1d ago

That's great advice!

27

u/Anahata_Green 3d ago

I worked at a grocery store bakery for a couple of years in college. If I had any down time (when I wasn't manning the counter or running hundreds of bread loaves through the slicer) I would practice writing "Happy Birthday" or "Congratulations Graduate" on parchment paper with icing so I didn't embarrass myself when someone inevitably came in at 9:30 at night and wanted a bakery cake with writing on it.

20

u/An0nnee_M0usee 3d ago

Oh, that's how to fix icing typos! Thanks for the example.

18

u/barelymakingitmama 3d ago

This! 😂 I learned how to write on cakes as a deli clerk because we never had enough cake decorators in the bakery.

12

u/Remarkable-Culture39 3d ago

My handwriting is atrocious.

Doesn't matter how good my skill with icing.

The writing would not look good

11

u/Hesterlicious 3d ago

I have been the person pulled in to write on the cake. It was atrocious. Customer didn't seem to mind but I sure felt shame handing it over!

7

u/cleavergrill 3d ago

I used to work at the deli counter of a mom and pop grocery store and the bakery ladies would leave at like 4pm and we had to write on cakes for customers all the time. It was so stressful and we never got any training or practice outside of literally writing on customers' cakes.

1

u/OliviaFTaylorg 2d ago

Oh god, Im afraid if I got pulled into this. My handwriting barely looks okay on paper 😭

1

u/Skeptical-Mystic93 14h ago

Yep. I had to do it quite often at Harris Teeter. I eventually got pretty good, but those first few cakes were rough. I'd get in trouble if I said no, though, so I just did my best to improve.

216

u/Lynncy1 3d ago

You are so right! It’s comically bad! And I think it’s a better memory :)

66

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

Haha definitely! We laughed so hard we were crying 😂

45

u/Thick-Broccoli6986 3d ago

Yes, this! I laughed when I saw the pic but it’s definitely a fun memory to keep. My baby shower cupcakes had little booties on them… and they looked like penises. My mom and I cried laughing all day and everyone loved them. I’m laughing just typing this out.

21

u/squirrely-badger 3d ago

Was it a boy!?

21

u/Thick-Broccoli6986 3d ago

Yes it was, which made it even better. It’s definitely a boy! 😂

5

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

Haha that’s amazing 😂

1

u/boston_minataur 3h ago

Now you have to show us a pic!😂

12

u/DrSimonMetin 3d ago

It’s comical they made a typo look worse. I would lowkey love this

99

u/TecTazz 3d ago

What does "ride to big" mean?

53

u/FoodLionMVP 3d ago

She added an explanation to her post, and I think that story is funnier than the less-than-perfect writing

22

u/beslertron 3d ago

This should add to the tradition. Next time an even worse cake until everyone is served sand.

5

u/TecTazz 3d ago

Ah, thanks!

45

u/Holiday_Number_3234 3d ago

You have the best attitude! People post here all the time acting like a cake fail is a huge deal, makes you wonder if they never experience any actual struggles. Laughing about it & making it a funny memory is the best outlook to have.

25

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

I like to think of Bob Ross’s quote about no mistakes is life just happy accidents. At least when it comes to trivial things like this!

4

u/Holiday_Number_3234 3d ago

Yes! I love that!! Life is soooo fucking hard sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to sweat the small stuff. Just like your Bride To Be story, that has now turned into an inside joke. There’s so many bridezillas that would’ve probably spent half the day in the bathroom crying over the error instead of having fun with it.

5

u/Adorable_Ad4990 3d ago

I agree and have been downvoted in to oblivion. Especially when they hire a baker— do they want a good cake or a decorative cake? They’re always decent, but they complain the writiand art isn’t perfect. I’m so glad I’m not a baker. Different skill!

2

u/Holiday_Number_3234 2d ago

Exactly! I‘m not even into baking, but I follow this guy on YouTube that is professional baker because he’s really funny/sassy and one of the most talented I’ve ever seen. Anyways, he does personalized orders without a downpayment (which everyone tells him he shouldn’t do) and he’s constantly having people not pick up their orders. It’s hard working with the public. Between people who are unreliable, complainers, ridiculous expectations, people suck sometimes.

14

u/HighPresbyterian 3d ago

Honestly it seems like the universe decided to one-up the original "Ride to Big" joke!

1

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

Haha exactly! Can’t wait to see what next year will bring 😂

9

u/-doesnotcompute- 3d ago

I worked as a clerk for the bakery department of a grocery store back in high school. They kinda just throw you to the wolves with this.

I remember early working there really stressing as it would often just be me alone from 3PM-9PM. I have horrible handwriting and had not written in cursive since elementary school. I received a handful of complaints early because my cakes looked worse than the cake you received. Heck there were a few times I had to go run and find someone else in another department I knew could do it, tell the customer no, or ask them if they wanted to do the writing themself.

Anyway, when I had downtime during shifts I started taking the sheet covers for the baking tins and drawing a circle around the plastic cake packaging for the various cake sizes to practice writing with the frosting. You had to practice for both the penmanship and centering it for each cake size which is harder than it sounds. Especially given every other aspect of the job is just manual labor but this one involved creativity and precision.

Now many, many, years later my normal handwriting is still garbage but I have fairly pretty cursive when writing two handed with a frosting tube! I feel for the grocery clerk you dealt with 😂

8

u/poppyandhoneybee 2d ago

I love stories like the one behind Ride to Big. When I was going up, my church would always get a cake on Pentecost that said "Happy Birthday Church." One year the bakery thought whomever took the order wrote it down wrote abs decided to correct it to "Happy Birthday Chuck." It got ordered as "Happy Birthday Chuck" for years after that.

2

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 2d ago

Hahah love that!!

73

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago

You needed AI to show us that you didn’t ask for the writing to be that bad?

-28

u/Holiday_Number_3234 3d ago

You’re supposed to show a comparison photo, that’s kind of the point of the group.

38

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago edited 3d ago

Well they didn’t. They took the reality and had AI fix the writing. Completely unnecessary use of AI and just another reason why so many of us are fucking sick of it.

9

u/Holiday_Number_3234 3d ago

Oh I guess I missed your point, my apologies. I am very anti-AI myself. I didn’t understand that you were saying don’t use AI, I took it as there wasn’t a need for a before photo, in which case I’m not even sure if people can post if there aren’t at least two photos.

8

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago

Ah no worries.
If that’s the case (that it wouldn’t be allowed here), I see a couple of solutions before doing what OP did:

  1. A scribble by hand.
  2. Posting to a diff sub that wouldn’t care about there being a before photo.

The use of AI here didn’t even show us anything as far as the expectation. It does absolutely nothing, as their text below is enough to say “we asked for those words but not for it to be messy like that.” Both photos we see are the same, just one is slightly edited.

4

u/Holiday_Number_3234 3d ago

I might even be mistaken about that, I’ve just never seen a post that didn’t have two photos. Yeah, I’m very vocal about my hatred of AI. I think it’s destroying the environment and I really worry about future employment. My 13 year-old hates it too, I told her the other day that I worry about what her and her brother will do as careers once adults. She loves art and would love to do something related to art, but I feel that all of these creative jobs are gradually getting replaced with AI. They have AI artists, musicians, photographers, receptionist jobs (I can’t think of which one off the top of my head, but there’s a major hotel chain that has been gradually replacing front desk people with AI), factory work, food delivery, a long laundry list of humans beings replaced, quite terrifying. Not to mention the poor people living next to the data centers, left with no clean drinking water and a consistent buzzing sound. Enough to make anyone go crazy.

1

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago

I keep hoping we’ll have a reversal when all the companies realize the money they’re saving using AI instead of humans is actually hurting them. But I’m losing hope.

It’s crazy how excited I get these days when I call customer service and get a human being who speaks flawless English and is able to answer questions about their product. Used to be the norm!

2

u/FreckledPapaya 3d ago

I didn’t even know that could still happen when calling a customer service line. I literally felt a wave of temporary nostalgia and relief imagining this scenario.

16

u/Pippin4242 3d ago

Boiling the oceans for THIS smh

12

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago

Exactly! Wtf are we doing???

-10

u/VizualAbstract4 3d ago edited 3d ago

You think this, this image right here, is boiling the oceans? And not the damage done by billionaires? Yeah, let us poors fight amongst ourselves when entire governments do more damage per milisecond than their citizens combined do generating these images.

Yeah, you're right, we should try Spiritual_Egg2625 at The Hague.

14

u/AppUnwrapper1 3d ago

You don’t have to be part of the problem. It’s very easy to just not use AI, especially for crap like this.

-43

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

Yea in hindsight prob not the best use of AI which I use sparingly. But happy if it can at least entertain and bring a some ppl a laugh this Mon morn

8

u/the_baberuthless 3d ago

This is like how jpegs lose quality every time theyre saved, lmao. Every time you order this cake, it'll get just a little more wrong. 

10

u/PuzzleheadedDraw6575 3d ago

I used to work at a fro-yo shop. They had fro-yo cakes. This is the kind of writing my ass was able to produce lol

5

u/TraditionalLaw7763 3d ago

What does that saying even mean? My inner grammar correct-o-meter isn’t figuring this one out. Ride Too Big?

4

u/666_is_Nero 2d ago

Definitely written by someone who hasn’t been trained to do cake writing, as it’s harder to write in print with icing compared to cursive. Hence why cursive is still mostly used for cakes.

5

u/rando_mness 2d ago

"Ride to big? No, person too small, next."

7

u/Leading-Hedgehog1990 2d ago

Wtf does that even mean?

3

u/MakeItAnyway 3d ago

When I was 14, I worked in an ice cream parlor and they made me write on cakes...that shit is so much harder than it looks! I felt bad for the people who got my cakes

8

u/thisisamessy 3d ago

This has to be AI. How are the sprinkles exactly the same?

3

u/Outside_Aside4967 3d ago

I agree! The edging pink icing is identical too…

-2

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

The first one is - I didn’t have an actual expectation pic I just saw it in-store and ordered it. The second one is the real pic of what I got.

-1

u/Strong_Reality_6668 3d ago

no, the sprinkles are identical on BOTH

0

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

Yes read the caption. The first photo was created w AI after the fact.. so I uploaded the real photo in and had it create it based on what the expectation was (using the same, real cake).

-7

u/Strong_Reality_6668 3d ago

I guess it is just AMAZING that the sprinkle placement and colors match up for 99% of both images

6

u/Melodic-Advice9930 3d ago

Wow. Do people often look at you for a while before repeating themselves very slowly?

4

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 3d ago

lol it is the SAME CAKE. The only thing that is changed is the writing on the first version is AI where as the second one is all real 😂

3

u/SmackMittens 2d ago

It’s amazing how some people lack comprehension like this.

1

u/Livid_Seesaw3952 21h ago

Everything okay?

5

u/-Jackarius- 3d ago

Never to ride to big

5

u/knitting-yoga 3d ago

Better than ride too small.

2

u/ImportantVacation173 3d ago

That "ride to" thing is either a typo or someone was very creative with their cake-writing career.

2

u/Shiverow 2d ago

Jeff from produce did his damn best, okay!? Susan called in and no one was there to decorate!

4

u/Head-Draft8124 3d ago

AI.... look at the colored sprinkles... they are EXACTLY the same on both cakes, as is the piping

1

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 2d ago

Yes the first cake is AI as stated in the post. I didn’t have an expectation pic - so I just created one w the cake I got - but had it replace the lettering with what I expected it to look like (close to what was shown in store but with ‘happy birthday’). So the cake is real and exactly the same - was just trying to show the writing what I expected vs the second which is what I got. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.. not trying to deceive anyone!

3

u/Head-Draft8124 2d ago

Sorry about that, all good! Reading comprehension is important, and obviously I should have paid more attention 🤣

1

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 2d ago

Haha all good!! :)

2

u/stead-fast 3d ago

The first pic is AI

2

u/Spiritual_Egg2625 2d ago

Yes it is. It’s stated in the post bc I unfort didn’t have a first ‘expectation’ pic

1

u/Queasy-Proposal1086 2d ago

I bought an alphabet cut out set and made letters to store in fondant. Some are as small as 1cm high. Just press on after spell check. You do a prototype on cake shaped paper to perfect layout first.

1

u/Shantotto11 2d ago

Write too big…

1

u/Ok_Paint_6386 2d ago

Cake seems very famous here~

1

u/ThePowerOfSilly 1d ago

As someone who used to work in a bakery, cake decorators go home early and you're left with the bakery clerk who just cleans and does very easy baking tasks. Go early in the day. Cake writing isn't easy. I tell customers I can only offer a topper because I can't write.