After laughing our way through Cake Wrecks, The Girl (age 11) and I knew we had to read Jen Yates’ second book of professional cake disasters. Wreck the Halls finally arrived at our library, and we finished it the day we brought it home. Based on the hilarious Cake Wrecks blog, Wreck the Halls focuses mainly on Thanksgiving and the winter holidays.
Yates’ captions to the photos submitted by “Wreckporters” are sometimes more hilarious than the cake wrecks themselves. We especially enjoyed her rendition of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, complete with some horrifyingly creepy cakes. The Girl really liked the various interpretations of Santa Claus by the so-called “Wreckorators,” ranging from silly to scary. Her favorite was Santa with red-painted, very movie star-like lips. My favorites were the cakes that merged Star Trek and Star Wars, along with cakes sporting ridiculous spelling errors and those highlighting some decorators’ inability to follow simple instructions from customers. One cake featured a huge space in the middle and was the decorator’s interpretation of a mother’s request for a “space cake” for her son’s Jedi birthday party.
I found this book funny, but I laughed more and harder while reading the first book, Cake Wrecks. I think restricting the book to just holiday cakes put a damper on the humor somewhat. The variety of cakes and the awful misspellings were what I enjoyed most in the first book, and that variety just wasn’t present in this one. However, The Girl loved Wreck the Halls even more than the first book, and she nearly died laughing at the picture of a gingerbread man with a sprig of mistletoe randomly placed in his armpit. (I loved that cake wreck, too!)
If you find these decorating disasters hilarious and enjoy the Cake Wrecks blog as much as I do, you won’t want to miss Wreck the Halls. I hope a third book is in the works!
Disclosure: We borrowed Wreck the Halls from our local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.
© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.
These sound like fun books.
They are! I think you’d enjoy these.
I soooo love CakeWrecks! I pull it up and laugh with my faculty occasionally. So good to be so bad.
It’s a great pick-me-up during my lunch break on an especially stressful day!
I love Cake Wrecks and didn’t know there’s a holiday book out! What fun!
I hope there are more books coming out. I can’t get enough of the spelling errors for some reason.
Wohoo more cakes
And more wrecks!
These books sounds like so much fun. I have checked out the site, and really enjoyed it.
It is a hilarious blog!
I must must must get these books to enjoy myself!
I can’t wait to see what you think of them!
This one sounds like a must read to me! The Cake Wreck site has me laughing all of the time!
I think these books could make anyone laugh!
Maybe not as fun as the first one, but this still sounds like a lot of fun!
It definitely was fun.
These books and the blog seem hilarious! I’m glad you could share this book with your daughter.
Sometimes she laughed harder than I did!
For Christmas I gave this to my cousin who bakes and decorates cakes. It was a huge hit.
It’s great to hear that even a decorator finds it funny!