Live With It

While I ate my lunch, I watched a TV reality show, Cake Boss, which shows how a family-owned bakery operates. The host, Buddy, is personable, hard-working, Italian volatile, and always both acknowledges and applaudes the dedication of his staff.

In the episode, a bride-to-be and her mother come into the bakery to order a wedding cake, the design and details of which are discussed, sketched, and approved. The baker makes the cake as ordered and puts it into the 'fridge for delivery on the big day. However, the day before the wedding, the bride shows up and demands to see her cake. Her comment: it's ugly. She wants to know if her mother paid extra for the world's most boring wedding cake.

Buddy is astounded as he's worked hard to make a beautiful cake that he knows the bride will love on her special day. When it becomes obvious that the obnoxious bride not only does not want the cake she's ordered but expects him to make her another cake, Buddy walks off to cool down before he continues the conversation. While his back is turned, the bride picks up tubes of brightly colored icing that she squirts all over the beautiful, all-white wedding cake.

I'm sure the look on my face was the same look on Buddy's face when he came back and saw what she had done to the cake. When Buddy directed the bride to leave (probably before he smacked her), she did, tossing off the parting comment that now, maybe, he gets it. The bottom line is that the bride-to-be approved the design and ordered the cake; her responsibility was to pay for the finished product whether she liked it or not because it is what she ordered. She could have asked Buddy how additional color could be added to the cake or how the design could be supplemented or given any other suggestions she had to alter the cake. However, once she defiled the cake, it was a done deal: you ordered the cake, you ruined the cake, you pay for the cake and use it or not -- your choice.

The employees of the bakery said "hell, no" after Buddy talked to the mother of the bride and assured her that he would make another cake and deliver it to the wedding venue the next day. As one astonished employee said, "I have to stay late and work my ass off because this spoiled brat ruined her cake?" Buddy says he wants to be the bigger man for the mother's sake, but in my world the more adults accommodate that kind of bad, inappropriate behavior, the more the behavior becomes acceptable. This bride absolutely expects Buddy to make her another cake, for which she will not pay, and is willing to do whatever it takes to assure that she gets her way.

This behavior has been reinforced in her past: if it didn't work, she wouldn't do it.

I'm sorry that Buddy baked and decorated another wedding cake for this ungrateful bride, but I can understand why he did so. If the bride had expressed even a token thanks, I'd say he did the right thing, but she refused to acknowledge Buddy or the cake in spite of her mother's pleas to do so. Buddy would have been better served by delivering her the cake she enhanced with her personal artistic flair and letting her live with the consequences of her actions.

Sometimes, doing the right thing is the wrong thing to do, and this is one of those times.