I can remember when I was in high school, our principal did a fun stunt at a pep rally once. He sat on a chair on a stage and allowed the cheerleaders to throw pies at his face. You probably have seen something similar in your life. It’s meant to be funny, and usually, it’s just that, as long as the “victim” is participating willingly. However, the practice can be dangerous if you’re not careful. In my principal’s case, the pies were just whipped cream in aluminum pie pans, so there was no danger involved except how dangerously hilarious it was.
The problem is that you don’t always know what’s in a cake or a pie and one woman’s Facebook post perfectly illustrates exactly how badly it can go wrong when someone smashes a piece of cake (or a whole cake) into your face. The thing is that cakes don’t just magically stand up beautifully in most cases. Often, they have things like toothpicks inside of them to make them stay upright, especially if they’re designer cakes that are made by professionals. So when you smash someone’s face with a cake, it can actually be very dangerous if there’s something like this in the cake.
The tradition of smashing a birthday boy or girl with a cake is a usually fun celebration that originated in Mexico. It’s called “la mordida,” which means “bite” in the Spanish language. When a cake has multiple layers, it’s very often held into place with wooden sticks or even PVC pipes that bakers use to keep the layers in place. Injuries can result if these cakes get smashed into someone’s face, and an artist named Gimã found this out the hard way. When someone smashed her face with a cake, she discovered that chopsticks were being used inside the pastry to hold it upright.
On her Facebook account, Gimã has photos of the cake, the stick that’s sticking out of her eye, and her bandaged face. Let’s leave this practice behind. It’s just not safe. Let’s just enjoy this video and never actually do it again.
