Baking your kid’s birthday cake is a rite of passage for many moms. If you have any sort of skill in the kitchen, making a cake doesn’t sound impossible. But we’ve all seen a birthday cake fail or two. Whether it’s a cracked cake, too-sweet frosting, or something else, those are also a rite of passage. One mom was brave enough to share her birthday cake fail on social media. But she was shocked when her son didn’t make her feel bad for the errors. In fact, he praised her for her effort!
Marketing pro mom Axi Bontrager, shared her attempt to make her 4-year-old son a Spider-Man cake on Instagram. First, we see her try to make the frosting Spidey’s signature red, only for it to turn a shade of bubblegum pink instead.
“Ran out of food coloring about 3 times. Tried frosting this cake for 30 minutes. Gave up… This webbing piping was 100% harder than I thought I’d be,” she wrote over the video.
Bontrager spoke with Newsweek about the video, revealing that she greatly underestimated what it would take to pull off the cake. “I’m relatively good at baking, so I thought this was going to be super simple,” she said. “I overestimated how much butter I was going to need for such a small cake and underestimated how much food coloring I was going to need.”
After three trips to Walmart for more food coloring, she gave up. Spider-Man red was just going to have to be pink. Still, she wanted to do her best for her son. “My mom would do that for me growing up and it was my favorite thing,” she explained. Since Spider-Man is his “current obsession,” and she’s watched plenty of cake tutorials for her marketing job, she thought she’d avoid a birthday cake fail. “Apparently not so much!” she quipped.
But despite the pink frosting and wobbly webbing, her little boy loved his cake. “Look! My mom did a good job,” he can be seen saying to his dad in the video. Those words caught the mom by surprise. “I did do a good job?” she asked.
“After I turned the camera off, I definitely cried a little bit,” Bontrager said. “He’s such a sweetheart. He did ask why it wasn’t red, but then said it was OK because his favorite color is pink—which I know it’s not, it’s blue. He just wanted to make me feel better. He’s super empathetic for a 4-year-old.”
Her son’s kind reaction to her “failure” had people in the comments sharing love as well.
“People need to start realising that kids LOVE effort! They don’t care about aesthetic, they don’t appreciate it. They remember, love, dedication & time,” one person wrote.
“Your son has more EQ than most fully developed grown men are walking around with. As the mom of a daughter, this gives me so much hope for the next generation of partners,” another person wrote.
