A grocery store birthday cake is causing quite a bit of head-scratching on the internet.
On Sept. 1, Reddit user Christian Kincaid (u/sheikpls), a man living in the Atlanta, Georgia area, posted a custom cake order he got from Publix for his girlfriend’s father. The result didn’t quite meet the family’s expectations in a rather hilariously blobby way.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Kincaid wrote.
One of the photos he posted shows the cake he ordered: Publix’s “Minecraft Mobs Beware” cake, decorated with a grouping of fondant squares made to look like the game’s land-based pixels. The sheet cake comes with a six-piece cake topper consisting of two stackable block sets and four Minecraft characters.
In the second photo, we see the cake he got, which appears to be an impressionist painter’s interpretation of the dessert. Instead of fondant, there are uneven globs of piped icing. The base cake is a close-but-not-quite rectangle, and the text, “Happy 39th Birthday Dad,” is barely legible in the shade of yellow it was written in.
Commenters had a field day discussing how this order could have happened.
“I can’t believe that’s from Publix, mine would never have let that out the door,” wrote one user.
“the f—ed up blue squares have me scream-laughing,” wrote another.
One more added, “doesnt look remotely the same. thats an easy refund!”
There were some folks, however, who empathized with the bakery worker who made the cake.
“I guarantee the moment they saw this order it was dread,” one user wrote. “those stupid blocks are tedious as f*#%.”
“As a cake decorator, I LOATHE when people request Minecraft cakes for this very reason,” added another.
Publix did not immediately respond to TODAY.com’s request for comment.
“I had my expectations tempered for a Publix cake, but for a cake to be $40, it just seemed like it was thrown together at the last minute,” Kindcaid tells TODAY.com, adding that he had ordered the cake well in advance, so the result was a huge surprise. “I don’t expect it to be ‘MasterDhef’ or ‘Cake Boss’-level, but it just looked like it wasn’t even sculpted properly.”
Kincaid says, however, that getting a Minecraft cake for his girlfriend’s father was a joke in the first place, so it all went over well.
“He’s not actually 39; he’s in his 50s,” he says. “He thought it was hilarious … but my girlfriend, who actually placed the order and went out and picked it up and everything … she was kind of pissed about it. We kind of laugh about it now.”
Kincaid says they never asked Publix for a refund or a new cake.
“It’s more funny as a novelty, rather than have them go back and make whoever was doing this poor cake do it again,” he says. “It was fine, it tasted good and, you know, it wasn’t for a six-year-old … it was for a grown man, so it was probably the best case scenario.”
