Oh the glorious cake fail. Without you, google images would not be so nearly as enticing for the would-be procrastinator to make bad life choices. You are part hilarious, part instructive and part dream-destroying. But most of all, you stand testament to the harsh truth that producing magazine-worthy gateaux is sooo much harder than it looks.
Whilst it is perhaps strange to compare Dr. Erin Griffey and Victoria’s Munn research on Early-Modern European beauty recipes with cake fails, the truth is they have much in common. Like the naïve baker who watches an instructional video and smugly says “I can do that”, Griffey and Munn decided to try out some of the beauty recipes they had collated during their research. As they admitted, some turned out less than brilliant: rookie mistakes from rookie cosmetic makers.
The nature of western academia, especially regarding history, makes it easy to think that if we observe something enough we can comprehensively understand it. However, Griffey and Munn’s experience illustrates this neglects the existence of an altogether different knowledge genealogy: intuition, something that can only be developed through personal experience.
As cake fails demonstrate, it is only by experiencing these recipes in all their practical messiness can we begin to decode what lies in between the lines of the instructions themselves – the skill involved, the time required and how to (often unsuccessfully!) salvage these imperfect homemade iterations. In doing so, it allows us as researchers to reframe these activities and those who partake in them not as two-dimensional but human: exploratory, difficulty-ridden, dynamic and deserving of our appreciation.
Feature image from Vaičiulaitytė, Giedrė. “Expectations Vs Reality: 30 of the Worst Cake fails ever.” Bored Panda. Accessed 21 May 2020. https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-cake-fails-expectations-reality/?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic.
