Cake Error

Even the relatively low-tech field of baking has adopted computers: a number of bakeries can now “print” photos onto a cake with an ordinary inkjet printer, edible paper and food-grade dyes. If you’re not satisfied with posting pictures of your cat on your blog, you can join the ranks of the edible imagers — there are companies like Icing Images and Icing Magic who carry the necessary supplies and books.

Since edible imaging is done with a computer, it’s only natural that someone would create a web order form where customers could enter the message they’d like to have printed on the cake. Of course, it helps to make sure that you’ve got the web application debugged; otherwise, you’ll get results like the one shown below:

Click to see a larger picture.

Those of you who are web developers will recognize the Microsoft conditional comments peppered all over the cake.

I suppose that nerds could give each other cakes with error messages printed on them — “444: Birthday entity too old,” and such.

For a little more detail on what happened with this cake, see this article.