What Puts the Wreck in a Cake Wreck?

Let's take a break from the Holocaust and neo-Nazis for a bit to discuss some good ol' popular culture.  I, like many internet procrastinators, find a set of reliably funny sites to laugh at when I need a break from reading/writing/graaaaaading/etc.  Some favorites are Overheard in New York (or Overheard Everywhere, which I'm secretly dying to be featured on due to one of my more fanciful classroom claims), videos of Maru on YouTube, and Cake Wrecks.

Psychedelic, no?

Cake Wrecks is a blog devoted to "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong."  This has probably happened to many of us, including this winner that my Mom got one year. Reportedly it was not only fancifully decorated with these "flowers," but it tasted odd enough that my grandfather decided it was really better to push around on his plate than actually eat.

Cake Wrecks strives to only mock those cakes made by professionals, never to make fun of our friends' good-natured cakes.  Although, occasionally one can end up with a really talented baker friend and get surprised by a cake like this one, from my 29th birthday.

So cute! Thanks, Kelly!

Anyway, Cake Wrecks is also written by a blogger with a great sense of humor and ability to make puns out of just about anything.  The site has been successful enough that there are two spin-off books for purchase, and author Jen Yates goes on book tours around the United States.  It's a phenomenon, is what I'm saying, ok?  So why write a blog about it?  Clearly I'm not "just" adding this here to praise some funny sites and add cake pictures from my past.  (All cake images beyond these first two are copyright Cake Wrecks).

Cake Wrecks primarily functions on two types of humor: terrible cake "artwork" and terrible cake text.  The things that professionals put on cakes!  There are the infamous "Naked Mohawk-Baby Carrot Jockeys" (which, honestly look like babies riding carrots at least!) to the amazing recently-spotted diploma cupcake-cake (Jen's caption: I call it, "Tar Donkey Butt-Peeing").  The terrible artwork is consistently amusing.  While I won't link to them all, there are terrifying bridal shower cakes with babies bursting from wombs, foot fungus cakes, and unintentionally phallic cakes galore.  

However, it's the terrible cake text that calls for some analysis.  Let's take a look at "The Cake that Started it All:"    

While this (and others below) is a horrible/hilarious mistake it also seems to be an example of what we could deem functional illiteracy.  Functional illiteracy is often defined as "a person whose reading or writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs."  Clearly, this decorator can write.  And read.  But they lack the ability to contextualize instructions, to think critically about what the words mean in relation to each other.  

Literacy rates in America are overall quite high (The CIA, as of 2003, lists Americans as 99% literate).  Yet 2003 studies on literacy have more layers than merely overall ability to read and write to complete simple tasks.  The most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy was completed in 2003.  Their findings cover prose, document, and quantitative literacy.  Basically, can one comprehend articles, brochures, etc; can one read things like job applications, maps, or bus schedules; and can one understand how to calculate a tip, balance a checkbook, or do basic everyday calculations.  All of these are necessary for basic, everyday life in the 21st century.  (Of course, for tips and checkbooks and buses, there's probably an app for that.  But we'll touch on that later.)  

 

The 2003 study found no significant change in prose and document literacy between 1992 and 2003.  And quantitative literacy actually went up in that time period:

* indicates statistically significant difference

This would look like a good sign, yes?  However, the study also found that there were "Fewer adults with Proficient prose and document literacy in 2003 than in 1992."  So while we have a good deal of basic literacy in terms of documents and prose, between 1992 and 2003 the overall sophistication of those skills went down.  We can assume, from the fact that these cakes are professionally done, that the decorators were able to navigate a basic job application.  Yet the ability to proficiently interpret instructions gets lost somewhere along the way.  (One might say "maybe they were just high" but I think that distinction goes to the "Happy Falker Satherhood" cake.)  Naturally, I'd like to believe that a robust humanities education would help the proficiency of prose literacy.  But that's going to have to be another post, because otherwise this blog will only ever get hashtagged #longreads and no one will ever read it.

Why does this matter for a blog that discusses power and privilege in popular entertainment?  When you look at the demographics of the 2003 study one finds a clear connection back to various identity categories, including race and ethnicity.  While the rates for African Americans improved between 1992 and 2003 there was a shocking decline in the literacy rates of Latino/as, "down 18 points in prose and 14 points in document."  I can think of a series of potential explanations for this based on dates and cultural trends, including a complex relationship detailed here about NAFTA, outsourcing, and Latino immigrants there's a clear inequality in how literate Whites are vs African Americans and Latinos in the 2003 study (clearly, I'd love to see an updated 2013 study done).  

Seen this one around your social media?

While we may want to believe that we're merely judging others based on their ability to follow "proper" (read: white) sentence structure, what we're actually doing is boiling down complex educational inequalities and laughing at those less fortunate or literate than ourselves (as my poet-friend and editor rightly pointed out recently in response to this user card above).  This makes these cakes seem more sad than funny, a sign not of inattentive workers, but rather those doing their best to make do with an uneven grasp on the complexities of the written/spoken word.

 How does the digital age impact these statistics, then?  As mentioned above, there's certainly an app for calculating tips and balancing checkbooks.  But those, too, are the realm of anyone privileged to carry a smart phone or tablet.  If there is/was an updated version of this study it would most likely raise questions about how online communication impacts the ability to be proficient (can perform complex and challenging literary activities) prose readers.  (We're also lacking any question of visual literacy here!)  Articles such as this one from the New York Times open a discussion on the debate of failing literacy vs. different type of literacy.  This is a topic that I'm looking to explore at SAMLA 2013 here in Atlanta or MLA 2014 in Chicago, although an extended post on the topic will have to wait as this one is already getting pretty longwinded.  Suffice it to say, I'm not going to assume our functional literacy abilities are going down the tubes due to the internet.  And we'll talk more about it later.

In the meantime, don't worry, there's always cakes like this one that need our laughter:

Aww.  It's...cute?

Finally, go now and read the post which this last cake came from.  It highlights the best Cake Wrecks has to offer.