For better or worse, bad cake content does appear to be quite popular. Baking show aficionados know that for every series documenting the best things professional bakers can make, there is a show dedicated to amateurs trying and failing. Take Netflix’s Nailed It! which centers on home cooks attempting to recreate professional cakes.

As one can imagine, it goes horribly wrong most of the time. Even without the pressure of a time limit and competition, people at home mess up constantly. After all, baking is a science, while decorating takes hours of practice. In that sense, a delicious, gorgeous cake takes such a cross-section of skills that it might be best to leave it to the professionals. 

Good cakes simply take a lot of planning. Your oven and dishes need to be ready, and your ingredients measured out properly. Temperatures have to be managed, you can’t let your butter be too warm in certain situations, in others, it can’t be too cold. Don’t overmix, but also don’t undermix, let things cool, and don’t overbake, the list of things that can go wrong simply goes on and on. 

Because the oven and mixer are doing most of the work, the “human” element of making a cake has to be managed perfectly. Cooking a dish often has more leeway, you can taste, add, and adjust as you go. Even with the plethora of bad cooking tips out there, most of us can make a tasty dinner, given time. 

Of course, even if you have mastered the cake batter and baking process, no mean feat, there is also the question of decorating. Applying frosting, managing its temperature, and mixing food coloring to get the right effect isn’t exactly easy as well. It’s like painting, except your tools are five times larger than the more ergonomic paintbrushes. 

Once you add in fondant and modeling chocolate, you are in a world of pain until you learn how to do it. After all, chocolate needs to be tempered, which feels like a particularly cruel chemistry experiment. Fondant has to be rolled and modeled, colored, and painted. All this just to make a cake slightly more pretty before it’s sliced up and consumed. 

The end result is that many will fail, as can be clearly seen here, but there is then all the more glory for the bakers who can manage to turn out something beautiful. So if you struggle to bake something that is edible, keep trying, this article is evidence that most people, including some professionals, simply can not make it.