When I think of cakes, I think of celebrations. Beautifully decorated and tasty celebrations. Imagine the delight induced by a chocolate cake from your sweetie, with white icing saying, "I don't want to go out with you anymore."

Wait. What? This cake was supposed to be a proclamation of undying love, not a breakup a la baked goods.

This is just one of many disasters that can be found in "Cake Wrecks" by Jen Yates. A cake wreck, you ask? To use Yates' words, it is "any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate -- you name it." In other words, they are deliciously funny.

Yates created www.cakewrecks.com in February 2008. Her photographic forum of cakes gone wrong started out as something for her friends to laugh at every now and then. She wrote funny things about the cakes, her friends would comment, and that was it -- until comments started coming in from strangers viewing the site. Since then, her site has been frequented by cake eaters and cake bakers alike.

Certainly, the pictures of the ruined cakes are funny by themselves, but what really makes this book is her commentary. Yates mixes her observations with a pound of wit, putting the laugh-out-loud icing on this cake book.

There is a variety of wreckage, including misspellings, caved-in tiers and icing jobs that look like a 5-year-old could have done better. Most of these wrecks are professionally made, which means serious cash was doled out for some of them.

But of the disaster cakes, Yates hopes that Cake Wrecks "reminds us never to take ourselves too seriously, and that nothing in life is a total loss if it makes you smile."