This Sounds So CUTE — Ridiculous, But Cute

I worked as a cake decorator during my undergrad. I worked in a grocery store chain, so we were all about efficiency and speed; I had like seven minutes per cake to fully assemble and decorate standard case cakes. (That didn’t happen, but I tried!) We could have fifteen minutes for custom orders. The hours we were allotted for cake decorators for one week depended on how productive we’d been in previous weeks; the system counted automatically every time we printed a label for a cake.

Once, a young guy came in and placed a custom order. I was twenty-two, so he was probably around twenty-five. My brain is telling me he looked slightly like a “chill” type; maybe he had a beard and a beanie.

Customer: “I want a sheet cake for my friend’s birthday. On it, I’d like an artistic interpretation of what each of my friends would look like as a cat based on their physical appearances and personality traits. I want each cat to have an item that reflects a hobby — like, one friend who likes to write would have a notebook… but still as a cat. Oh, and I also need you to write each cat’s name so they’ll know who is who.”

He tried to describe each one of his friends to me in terms of appearance, notable characteristics, and hobbies. He had like eight friends.

I wish I remembered how I got out of the conversation and subsequently got out of that order! I usually worked with my manager or my bakery lead, and I feel like the lead took over. We were allowed to reject orders if they were better suited to a specialty bakery. (Many were; I don’t know why people thought we could do tiered cakes or use fondant.) We could turn down orders like this that were straight-up ridiculous.

It was really funny to me, though. I remember the guy being super earnest about the cat cake.