What An Ugly Cake Can Teach Us About Innovation & Failure
Try something new before your ambition shrivels!
Drunk with inflated ambition from binge-watching episodes of The Great British Bake-Off, a couple years ago I attempted a ridiculously complicated birthday cake for my father. It was going to be the first time we’d been together on his birthday in something like ten years, so I felt it was worth a little extra effort.
I’ll give you just a couple low-lights of how it turned out: after five careful hours of work, I produced a golf-themed black forest cake split onto two plates consisting of the “tee” and the “hole,” a thematic invention to deal with the fact that I didn’t have a big enough platter for the whole cake.
My golf club looked like a Christmas stocking and dad thought the flag was a camel. The “tee” portion listed precariously with all the green, green frosting sliding off the edge. The chocolate “Happy Birthday Dad,” painstakingly spelled out in Turkish, got bigger with each letter until the last letter was three times as big as the first.
And the piece d’resistance as far as I’m concerned, the “golf ball” formed out of white chocolate that looked like a hockey puck and was big enough for my mom to eat on for a week.
