Are you sitting down? Are you done with lunch? If not, you’ll want to make sure you get those two things accomplished before reading further.Go ahead. I’ll wait. … Done? Yes? Good. Here is why I asked you to prepare yourself in this fashion: Today’s WTF viral story of the day is a pimple popping cake. That is, it is a cake, topped with zits that are also made of cake, which you can squeeze, thereby popping the cake zit and encouraging more cake to emerge from deep within the baked good’s sizable, cake-y pores.
I… don’t even know what to do with this information. Except, clearly, put words about it on the internet. Because I just don’t think I can face it alone.
Anyway.
According to Mashable, this… uh… unique cake that’s currently making the rounds is made by the Malaysian bakery The Cakescape, which is located in the country’s capital city of Kuala Lumpur. The bakery told Mashable that it’s made about 20 zit cakes in the past year; however, orders have been picking up pretty speedily, too. They’re apparently usually purchased for shock value — which means it should as a surprise to absolutely no one that they’re seemingly a big hit at bachelorette parties.
To be fair, The Cakescape’s pimple cake isn’t a realistic depiction of a face full of poppable zits; in fact, it’s pretty cartoon-y. Here is what it looks like:
(Apparently the cake girl’s name is Evelyn — or at least, it is according to the necklace made of frosting she’s wearing. Or maybe the cake was made for someone named Evelyn? Anyone’s guess.)
And here is what it looks like in action:
Yep. That happened.
As grossed out as I am, though, it is sort of interesting to consider this cake within its wider context. The popping of unusual zits is having a bit of a moment right now, as evinced by the popularity of Dr. Sandra Lee, better known as Dr. Pimple Popper on YouTube — and indeed, there is some psychology behind why so many people find witnessing the popping of impressively large pimples and cysts so fascinating. As Bustle’s JR Thorpe recently wrote, “Our fascination with watching the pus explosions of others seems to be due to a combination of neural dopamine and tension release, the lure of the forbidden, cultural ideas of disgust, and socially evolved concepts of grooming and intimacy.” Indeed, The Cakescape's creation isn’t even the first interactive zit popping cake to have made the rounds; in 2016, the California bakery Blessed By Baking went viral for a batch of cupcakes it made that also featured poppable cake-zits.
On a more serious note, I do wonder whether things like this pimple-popping cake actually serve, even if it’s inadvertent, to marginalize people with dermatological health issues. Our culture is not generally kind to people who don’t fit into its rigid and narrowly-defined image of “beauty”; flawless, poreless skin is usually depicted as the ideal. Indeed, our culture has even gone so far as to associate things like warts, blemishes, and pocked skin with straight-up badness or evilness (ever wonder why witches are so frequently depicted as having warts?) — even though what you look like has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re a “good” or “bad” or “moral” or“immoral” person.
As someone who has never had great skin — I take care of it, but it is, shall we say, an area in which I did not win the genetic lottery — I feel a little like treating acne as a game, as something comical and funny to be laughed at and mocked, isn’t really helping fight the stigma associated with less-than-perfect skin.
But maybe that’s just me. If you are a regular watcher of Dr. Pimple Popper’s videos, you will probably also get a kick out of this cake; alas, you just won’t be able to order one for yourself unless you live in Kuala Lumpur. Anyone kind of curious about how it tastes…?
