Of the Icing

Far be it from me to say anything bad about the Wegmans supermarket chain (except that I hate them for not having a store around me), but, via Engadget, I was amused by their cake printer that could not handle special characters:
I'm sure that brought a tear to Aunt Elsa's eye.

I remember back in the late 1990s I did a story for Micro Publishing News on Torrance Bakery (in Torrance, CA), which was one of the first bakeries in the country to be able to print computer files onto cakes. They had adapted a Canon BubbleJet printer to use food-coloring-based inks that printed onto thin sheets of icing that could then be placed in top of a just-baked cake. For our holiday party we had the cover of our December issue printed on a cake. It looked cool but was kind of tasteless...slight flaw there...

I assume cake-printing technology has proceeded by leaps in bounds since then, though I still prefer my cakes to be imaged the old-fashioned way.