A Baker's Sticky Situation: Custom Cake Chaos on TikTok Live
A baker’s sticky situation with a customer was caught live on camera for all of the internet to see. On July 10, Abi Caswell, owner of Batter bakery in Hammond, Louisiana, posted a TikTok showing what happened when a dissatisfied customer put her on blast during a TikTok Live. “I have to say today was a first in the bakery 😭😭is this the new #cakegate ????” Caswell wrote in the caption of her four-minute video. “If you were on this live, you were on a rollercoaster.”
What follows is the story of one baker’s frosting- and frustration-filled afternoon. Caswell was decorating a heart-shaped cake while speaking to viewers, and about one minute in, she learned the client was following along. A colleague told her the client called to say the decoration they saw on the livestream is not, in fact, what they wanted.
“Restart the whole thing?” Caswell asked in disbelief. (Spoiler: She did restart the whole thing.)
The next three minutes is a crash course in customer service. Caswell spoke to the customer herself and clarified that the change will take around 40 minutes to make before she dove into the redesign. The client then went into the shop to draw out what they wanted — “spiky heart” decorations they say they saw on TikTok — and Caswell used the reference photo to complete the order.
“What you just witnessed is real live owning a business, on camera,” Caswell told viewers.
The video went viral, garnering more than 13 million TikTok views and upwards of 14,000 comments. “HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW THAT HEART,” wrote one TikTok user. “My confusion when you showed the ‘spiky heart,’” wrote another.
The customer told Caswell the inspiration came from a “trend” they saw on social media, but some users said they hadn’t ever heard of it. “Is the trend in the room with us? I haven’t seen it 😭,” someone wrote. “Anybody find the spiky heart trend?😁,” asked another commenter, to which someone responded, “No and I went on a deep dive.”
A search on TikTok for “spiky heart cake” and “spiky heart cake trend” do not seem to yield any cakes similar to the one the customer requested, and a search for “spiky heart” mainly reveals videos on spiked heart-shaped tattoos and jewelry.
“Miscommunication on her part, you took this so well,” added one commenter. “I would have had to get off live and go scream in a corner somewhere. 😂😭,” wrote another — Caswell replied, “I replaced the screaming with laughter 😭😭.”
As a business owner, Caswell says stress is just part of the job. She tells TODAY.com that her viral situation came as she was without a head baker (the previous employee had recently quit) and had a lot on her plate. “I was already a little overwhelmed because I was doing all of my boss stuff and then also baking until I could hire a new baker,” Caswell says, adding that she had been conducting 10 interviews a day. “I was in a bad, a bad way.”
“You could have asked me to draw a heart 50 different ways and I don’t think that that would have been one of the ways that I would have drawn it,” she continues.
Many commenters wondered why the customer waited until the cake was nearly complete before they called, and Caswell clarifies that before the client called the bakery, she was leaving comments on the livestream that the design was wrong — Caswell just didn’t see them.
All in all, the business owner — who finally hired a new head baker — is letting her stressful experience go, noting that it’s just another day in the life of a bakery owner. “I never want somebody to pay for something that they do not like,” Caswell says. “If somebody is genuinely unhappy with something, I want to make it right, I want to fix it.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com