Sometimes people will have great experiences at one place, while others will have a horrible time. Four times out of five, if the managers hear about your experience, they’ll usually do something to help you out and make your experience better. At most food places, they’ll do this by offering to remove the item off of your bill, exchange it for something else, or give you your next meal free of charge. Hopefully this story will have such an ending.
My niece recently celebrated her 4th birthday and earlier today happened to be her party. It’s been a long time in the planning and her mother decided to keep it local and order the cake from It’s the Icing on the Cake located near Queen and Leslie. As you can see, this place generally has positive reviews aside from the odd bad apple experience. When they ordered her cake, they were shown an example of a two-tiered Hannah Montana themed cake, complete with stars, guitars, and all things that would make any 4 year old fan beam a huge smile (thanks to the Walt Disney Co. marketing department). The bottom tier to be a giant slab of white cake with a icing star on it, the top tier to be star shaped with the Hannah Montana logo on it next to the usual “Happy Birthday Amber”. They were quoted $90 for the whole thing, which was pretty reasonable for two-tiered cake.
The $90 Hannah Montana Cake
As you can see above, there was no second-tier to this cake. And the designs which were supposed to be on the second-tier seemed to have dropped down to the bottom single-tier cake. Oh, mind the clutter on the cake. The necklace, slapbands, figures and buttons were added last minute to help salvage the cake and put a bit of a smile on Amber’s face, even at the expense of making it look like Hannah Montana threw up on it. Still, it looked better than what it originally did even with all the excess paraphernalia.
Maybe they were in a bit of a hurry and decided to not add the second-tier. No problem except for the fact that $90 was paid for this cake, which had nothing over a $25 cake made at Loblaws. Apparently when her parents went to go pick up the cake this morning, they were told that the cook who designed the cake wasn’t in today and the owner of the bakery was off as well and couldn’t be contacted until Monday (tomorrow, which is why hopefully there will be a future update to this).
It's the Icing on the Cake but apparently not in the middle
Now onto the cake itself. How can I put this lightly? If I was blindfolded and fed this cake, I would believe it was nothing more than a piece of the generic ‘keep in your freezer’ Sara Lee pound cake. I haven’t seen a single layered birthday cake since my mom made her own cake courtesy of Betty Crocker. The icing also had a very interesting after taste, that of sour milk. Not sure how that’s possible as icing is usually powdered icing sugar and water. Poor Amber didn’t really like the taste of her cake, and her mom was left feeling ripped off having paid $90 for this slab of baked flour, sugar, and milk. You may ask why her mom left with the cake and didn’t refuse the purchase. Well the fact that it was an hour before her party began left little time to hop over to the Loblaws and pick up another cake. Tomorrow the manager will be contacted so hopefully we can find out what happened to the second-tier.