Oh wow, I don't know about this...

If you can/have made a pretty cake before that any other human beings have seen, if you make a cake like this, either for ease of making it or just to be different, trust me that you will just be met with confused looks and resistance like "ok, where's your REAL cake?"

I think it's awesome. It looks like lava rocks. Put a volcano in the center and toy dinos all over the top! #2 and #3 are fun too, just not dino-rific.

Good luck cutting those cakes without things going from "messy" to "disaster"!

I want to smoosh my face into that chocolate quake cake!

It makes me laugh and I think that is an added bonus to the fact that it is a CAKE. Who can complain?

I have gotten more skilled at cake making over the years but my cakes will never look like anything but homey, homemade cakes, and sometimes that is just exactly what you want. I remember all the birthday cakes my not-very-food-oriented mom made me over the years, two days before she did exactly the same thing for my sister (yes, our bdays were two days apart and she always made sure we each had our own cake). I think of the love put into those unprepossessing cakes and I am happy to share the cakes I make too for the same reasons.

I bet it's harder to make that artful pile of cake (and keep it on the platter while carrying it to the table) than it is to deal with a traditional cake. I'm not tops in the decorating or plating departments, and I just know I can't stack cake chunks that well.

I'm not the best cake decorator, but my cakes are very tasty so I'm always getting volunteered to do the cakes for showers and parties at the office. My solution is to make the top as smooth and pretty as possible, then roughly ice the sides and press in sliced almonds or crushed hard candy or some other camouflaging extra.

I don't think that any of these are "piles of cake," I think it's the same technique, except with more cake or bigger candy.

I make the classically beautiful cakes, and have spent many hours working on them so a few travel mishaps and now rarely transport them finished (I finish them onsite at their destination), but the cake I make when I want not to worry about transporting it is something I call a 'quake cake' too. It looks quite a bit different than the one above, an extra cake layer is cut into skyscraper shapes which are iced and then sit on the top of the cake higgledy-piggledy along with (in my case: vegan) marshmallows covered in the icing and the whole thing is drizzled with caramel sauce. I challenge anyone to find a decorating mistake with that cake because every 'mistake' was lovingly planned! Now that's the cake most ask for rather than asking for the pretty or fussy ones.

Rucy.... we might need a photo or possibly a taste test!

The quake cake looks like a bunch of brownies stuck together. That being said, I'm drooling over it!

both those chocolate cakes make me sad

A friend of mine used to make something he called a "trifle;" he'd take a cooled chocolate sheet cake and gently break it into small chunks and then started building layers in a glass bowl with high sides: cake, drizzled chocolate sauce, whipped cream, sometimes sliced strawberries, and then cake, sauce, whipped cream and so on. It was actually very pretty, and tasted WONDERFUL.

Hey dxdt--he called it a trifle because that's what a trifle is! Many variations available, invented to use up leftover cake I think.

I should send this to my mother - the last time she made a birthday cake for me, it split down the middle as she was (too roughly) icing it...I had to blow out the candles really fast because one half the San Andreas Cake Fault was busy teetering off the cake server.

Sometimes presentation is important, but I say, if you can get away with it, taste is what is most important. :)

amy sedaris makes beautiful cake