So last night I was cruising the Internet looking at fun cake designs (because regardless of whether or not I have a legitimate reason to make one in the next six months, I still have to look for ideas–don’t ask, it’s probably caused by some weird genetic mutation.)

I spent quite a while checking out the cake at the Pink Cake Box. They have some seriously gorgeous confections on there–I seriously doubt I’ll ever be good enough to attempt many of them, never mind succeed. Still, many of the ideas can be adapted to a doable pattern for those of us who aren’t cake artists.

From there I ended up following a link to Cake Wrecks. Yes, this blog really is exactly what it sounds like. They actually highlight cakes gone bad six days a week, and recently started posting pictures of great cakes on Sundays. I think I spent nearly three hours laughing at the horrible, sad examples (and I’m less than a quarter of the way through their archives). I think I’ve now seen every possible mix of Congratulations and Graduation–Congraduation being my favorite, of course. And I also saw four different spellings for ‘daddy’ on Father’s Day cakes. Along with the correct spelling were dady, daday, and dadey.

You say that some poor little kid doesn’t deserve to be made fun of after decorating their dad’s cake? That would be true, if these sad, sad cakes didn’t come from bakeries. That’s right, folks. People paid good money for nearly every one of the wrecks on the blog. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the frosting faux pas. Okay, so many of the pictures were taken in grocery store bakeries while they sat in the display case hoping for some insane person to buy them. Still, are you kidding me?

Anyway, if you like to look at pretty (and no so pretty) cakes, check out the links. The bloggers at Cake Wrecks have a book out now (or being released shortly?) with almost all new content.

For those of you who waded through to this point because you want to learn how to win some terrific books, check out Writing Fortress, the blog I contribute to, along with a bunch of other writers from my publishing house. We’re giving away a bucketload of books throughout the month–you can even win one of my books The Ball’s In Her Court (which won’t be in print until October, but I promise to send you one of the first off the presses!). This collection of authors writes in nearly every genre and for every age (and they are awesome women).