Guy Sparks Huge Debate After Criticizing The Birthday Cake His Girlfriend Made Him — 'If I Wanted Vanilla I'd Have Asked For Vanilla'
We all want and deserve what we want on our birthday. But should he have just eaten the cake and let it slide?
Anton Estrada, Khoirul Mahmudin, pixelshot | Canva Are you the "I want it the way I want it" type? Or the easy-going "eh, whatever's fine" sort? Either way, you're about to have a lot of opinions about this story, which has divided the internet into warring factions over something so innocuous the argument could only happen on the internet itself — birthday cake.
A man criticized the homemade birthday cake his girlfriend made him because it wasn't exactly what he asked for.
The man recently wrote on Reddit asking for advice after his response to said cake had his girlfriend furious. He just turned 34 and for his big day, his girlfriend offered to bake him a cake and asked him what type he'd like. He said chocolate cake with chocolate icing and "nothing fancy."
What he got was slightly different — and it's touched off quite the conflict.
Instead of a fully chocolate cake, she made him chocolate cake with a layer of vanilla in the middle.
"She is usually a great baker," he writes, "and I guess she thought [chocolate cake] wasn't sophisticated enough or something." So she added the slightest spin to the old classic. "She baked me a chocolate cake with vanilla icing between the two layers of cake then surrounding in chocolate frosting."
Close enough, right? Not for this guy.
"The cake was fine," he wrote, "but I was disappointed because it was not what I wanted." His girlfriend took notice he wasn't feeling the cake and asked if he was disappointed, so he told her. "Yes. I was disappointed. It wasn't the cake I asked for. I said, 'If I wanted vanilla in a cake, I would have asked for vanilla in the cake.'"
He says he was just being honest when he criticized the homemade birthday cake, but his girlfriend was furious.
"I didn't make a scene. I didn't pout. I even ate half of a slice — the chocolate part," he writes. But his girlfriend was still hurt and perplexed, especially since she'd made him vanilla cake before and he loved it. "I pointed out that I don't mind vanilla icing, but it's not what I wanted for my birthday," he replied.
His girlfriend was hurt, "and she even pulled an 'I'm not going to make you any cake next year,' [to] which I replied with, 'I will order my own and get my money back if they don't do it like I want it.'" That was all she could tolerate — she kicked him out, scolded him for embarrassing her in front of her kids, and now isn't speaking to him.
He doesn't really understand what the fuss is all about. "I think birthdays are important things, and I feel like I was honest with her when she asked me," he writes. "I didn't want to lie about it." But his friends tell him he should be grateful she made him a cake at all, and he wonders if he truly is in the wrong.
The internet has been bitterly divided over whether he was in the wrong to voice his disappointment with his cake.
Reddit is known for its outrages and uproars, but it's rare that a Reddit post sparks such a debate that it spills over onto another platform like Twitter (or X or whatever nonsense Elon Musk has decided to call it this week). People have been debating this for days, and it has gotten downright heated!
Most people on both platforms seem to feel that the guy's response to his birthday cake was petty, insenstive and ungrateful. Many, like the top commenter on Reddit, didn't so much have a problem with him not liking the cake, but more with the way he handled it.
Photo: Reddit
On Twitter, though, a lot more people were on the guy's side. After all, is it really asking so much to get the kind of cake you wanted when your girlfriend specifically asked you what kind of cake you wanted? It's kind of hard to argue that it is!
Photo: Twitter
There was one thing everyone across the board seemed to agree on though — a 34-year-old man getting so bent out of shape about a dang birthday cake he felt the need to take it to the internet for arbitration is truly mind-boggling in its ludicrosity.
Photo: Reddit
As one person on Twitter put it, "[everyone sucks here] ... a relationship between children." Yeah, pretty much. It is fine to want and ask for what you want, not just on your birthday but every day. But this much sturm and drang over a layer of vanilla frosting on the inside of a chocolate cake?
You sure it was your 34th birthday, brother? Cuz it's kinda giving four-year-old! But hey, at least it allowed the internet to argue about something utterly and hilariously petty for once, and for that, we can all be grateful.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.