"YO JOEY! Does this picture make me look like a queer? But it's not my hand, it's the piping tube. No Joey, IT'S NOT MY HAND IT'S THE PIPING TUBE. Uh fuggetaboutit whaa geh *insert stereotypical Jerseyism*"
Perhaps I’ve been entrenched indoors in front of my TV that constantly spews deep cable trashiness, perhaps I simply need to pick my battles, but at this moment in time I can safely say that there is no reason for the “Cake Boss” to exist.
I’ll admit it, I watched this show when it originally debuted. The basic premise sounds like a recipe for perfection. It’s “The Sopranos” placed in a bakery, a bunch of New Jersey guys who talk tough but make outstanding works of edible art.
I’m sure even when they pitched the show it went something like, “Ok – imagine every whimsical moment in “The Sopranos” turned up - with pastries,” that sounds enchanting, only we’re soon forgetting that there really weren’t “whimsical” moments in the Sopranos. And you can’t easily fill the void of uninteresting characters with cake – trust me, I’ve tried.
The only way this show could gain any semblance of legitimacy is if the secret ingredient in their red velvet cake was Guido blood, or if the bags and bags of flour lining their kitchen were really filled with Columbia’s finest cocaine.
If Buddy (the ‘Boss’ of the show, because having his name be Luigi would be racist) were truly the Cake Boss, then his Mother would be the “Doughnut Don,” walking into the kitchen sporadically, pretending to ruffle feathers and then quickly retiring to a cocktail in some back room.
Buddy doesn’t act like a human being living in Jersey so much as a fusion between Chef Boyardee and Super Mario enrolled in the Witness Protection Program.
Tempers rarely fly on the show despite what the title suggests, only small annoyances with the state of their work (which is something truly beyond their control).
A typical interaction within the show goes:
Buddy: “Hey Joey, the bazooms on this bachelor party cake looks nuthin’ like my SKETCH!”
Joey: “Ey eyyy fugget about it” (They spout stereotypical Jersey-isms much in the same pattern that a person would ask what time it is).
Buddy’s Mom: “You boys got this? Ok. Good.” (disappears for the rest of the episode).
Instead of popping caps in hit men or even indulging us in the possibility of popping caps in one of their cakes (eliciting, as we all know, a much more entertaining or explosive result) the most aggression that appears around the bakery is when they prank their interns by dousing them with water from atop their roof and then shortly thereafter with flour. A crime and punishment tactic I last saw on “The Brady Bunch.”
TLC aka The Learning Channel is allegedly there to inform us of worlds beyond our comprehension in the midst of the deep cable trenches that have so epitomized modern schlubby living.
Their message is clear: If you’re not a small person who does a unique trade, or a woman with a uterus that defies common science, or in this case, a Jersey guy who plays into the stereotype many generations before him have tried adamantly to squash in an effort to distract the viewer from the fact that his cakes are horrible, then you my friend are in the minority.
My name is Julia Prescott, and after close observation I’m almost certain Buddy’s Bakery could be a front for the mob; the cakes are just that bad.
