(No caption)
Timing and perception count for a lot in politics.
Well, a birthday cake made for Sue Snyder, Michign's first lady, is getting notice on the Internet because.a cake that screams of prosperity and pampering when her husband grapples with a crisis in Flint is not a good thing for the governor's image.
The Week posts:
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is in the middle of dealing with a crisis in Flint, where lead pipes have contaminated the drinking water. While addressing a grave concern in an impoverished city, Snyder celebrated his wife's birthday with quite an upscale-looking cake from an Ann Arbor bakery, MLive reports.
Close-up shows the cake's realistic "hand-stitched" details.
Wonkette, a popular national blog based in Los Angeles, displays the slide above and says:
Maybe during the party they even had a little jar for people to leave donations to buy Flint more bottled water. We don’t know that they did, but it might have been a nice gesture.
In any case, the ostentatious cake was just the least bit unseemly, what with the children in Flint at risk for life-changing damage that’s likely to result in lower IQ, a predisposition to violence, learning disabilities, stunted growth, and a whole bunch of other health problems, which are neither sweet nor particularly nice to depict in fondant and royal icing.
Jessica Webster of MLive reports:
Heather Anne Leavitt, the cake designer and proprietress behind Ann Arbor's boutique cakery, Sweet Heather Anne, makes a lot of high-end, super-detailed cakes, so she didn't blink when a woman met with her to place an order for an expensive cake to be delivered to The West End Grill for a private party.
She didn't find out until she and her assistant delivered the cake to the upscale Ann Arbor restaurant that the cake was to be one of the centerpieces of a birthday celebration that Governor Rick Snyder was throwing for his wife, Sue. . . .
The designs included a bag from Chanel, a box from Tiffany & Co., a diamond necklace and a box from Nordstrom, which Leavitt rendered in cake and fondant. The cake took 30 hours to design, bake and decorate.
