Bakery Blues

When I pick up a special-order cake from the bakery, there is always that moment of anxiety—“Will it be ready? I hope they didn’t lose my order.”

Bakers must take a course called “How to Give Your Customer an Adrenaline Rush.” First, search through the cakes lined up on the baker’s rack, then step back into the oven area of the kitchen, nope, not there, then start looking under dish towels and pot holders, all while the customer stops breathing.

Finally, the lady-in-charge looked on the baker’s rack again, and found it. “Wow, I must be blind,” said the first gal.

That Can’t Be Right

With care she placed the quarter sheet cake in front of me, attractively boxed. I looked through the clear window to admire the decorations.

The cake was to honor Shirley, a member of our writers’ group, who has been published 50 times during her 20 years of writing. That’s quite an accomplishment, so when I phoned in the cake order I requested chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, which Shirley loves, to be decorated with balloons and the phrase, “20 Years of Writing!”

Now, I gazed at the cake and this is what I saw:

“20 Years of Writting!”

I Laughed Out Loud

I have to admit I laughed out loud at the irony. “Excuse me,” I said, “But I am taking this to a writers’ group and I cannot take it with a misspelled word.”

The two ladies in the bakery looked at the cake in confusion. “What is the problem?” they asked.

I pointed out “writing” should not have two T’s. They frowned at me like I did not know what I was talking about.

“Trust me,” I said. “Writing has one T.”

“All we did is follow the written order,” they showed me the paper with the order I phoned in. Yep. The paper showed ‘writing’ with two T’s.

“I did not know I had to spell ‘writing’ when I phoned in the order,” I explained.

Obviously, it was my fault.

How Do You Fix Frosting?

We decided they could carefully lift off one blue frosting “t” and re-connect the “i” and remaining “t” with a slightly wi-i-i-i-der bit of cursive. That worked pretty well.

They also gave me $5 off the cake. At the checkout, the clerk and I had a good laugh. She said, “Doesn’t ‘writing’ have two T’s?”

Mind you, these were not young kids, but older women I would have expected to know better.

I snapped a photo of the cake with the misspelling and my writers’ group loved the story. We aren’t all natural spellers. We depend on Spell Check. Most importantly, the cake was delicious and Shirley loved the chocolate frosting.

How about you? Have you had any cake decorating mishaps?