Among mankind’s greatest achievements, alongside cathedrals, symphonies, and self-warming toilet seats, one must count examples of fine culinary artistry. Some food looks better than it tastes. Nowhere is the human striving for beauty and complexity more apparent than in the world of cake-making. The plasticity and coloring potential of frosting inspires us to explore the limits of the art form.

We’ve all seen cakes shaped like whales (Fudgy the Whale) and cakes on adult themes. But there are those artists whose reaches exceed their grasps, who, like doomed Icaruses, fly too close to the sun and fall.

They are the makers of what, in a perfect world, might have been great cakes, but they were left with magnificent disasters. Now, they come together in one place, at Cake Wrecks.

Head over and have a look at the ever growing inventory of well-intentioned but catastrophic cakes. The misspellings and misshapings are legendary. The most extreme cases are magisterial in their own way. Here are a few examples to get you started.