You really shouldn’t eat caked pizza. Although I did once have a pizza’ed cake, when my (4yo) daughter dropped it.
I’ve had bad pizza. But not as often as I’ve had bad cake.
Cookies on the other hand are very rarely bad, in my experience.
Good god, no. Good cake is a rare thing. Nearly every cake I’ve ever has has been a bland wall of overwhelmingly unpleasant sweetness.
Pizza, on the other hand, alway has cheese, and thus is always good.
No. My wife’s lemon cake thoroughly sucks.
It was SO bad that I asked them to cut it in six slices, because I didn’t think I could eat eight of them.
I sort of live in one.
Eh, not for me. I can make pies in my sleep (no recipe required), and I don’t think I’ve made a truly bad one. Cake is not so easy. I tried to make my first pound cake recently, and it was like stale bread soaked in raw egg. And not in a good way, like French toast. I don’t know what the heck I did…
There is a theory (expounded by the great philosopher Garfield) that there is in actuality only one fruitcake in the world, which is continually re-gifted as soon as the recipient can think of someone he dislikes enough to send a fruitcake to.
I don’t actually like cake (it is rare that I find a cake worth eating), whereas I can eat even ‘bad’ pizza and be happy.
My grandmother, bless her, made a batch of fruitcakes every year - though where she found the dwarf star material that made it so dense, I’ve no idea. Despite the party line, which we all towed when talking about them, they were pretty good with coffee (which is why I didn’t appreciate them until grown).
That’s only American fruitcakes that are renowned for their staleness. The European and Aussie versions are really good. Every year we get a single-malt scotch- and/or rum-soaked one.
I have had bad pizza, bad cake, and even bad cookies! Not spoiled, freshly made, but just unpleasant in various ways. And before reading this thread, I had never heard of the “Pizza Rule.”
I don’t think that any food qualifies as “impossible to be bad” or “pretty good even if bad.”
In all my years, I only had one ‘bad’ pizza. It’s almost impossible to mess up pizza! but I once bought a pizza that was, after one bite, totally tragically inedible. (This is like saying, “it’s impossible to mess up a Snickers bar but I once bought a Snickers bar that after one bite was totally inedible”. that’s how rare that pizza thing was.) I’ve had pizzas on a scale of 1 to 11, and the 1 number is the cheapie cardboard crust frozen things, and those are not at all bad because sometimes I get a craving for the cheapie.
But I loathe cake, box cakes, and especially birthday cakes. I’ve only ever made cakes from scratch or spent $20 and up for a beauty from a bakery. OK. I hate cake, as a rule. The bad cakes FAR FAR FAR exceed the bad pizzas.
I’ve only had one bad pizza, but I’ve had hundreds of awful cakes. The kind you pretend to eat and wad up in a napkin and throw away when no one is looking.
Both seem just as accurate as the other. If you don’t mess up the ingredients or the amounts, both will turn out fine. If you do mess it up, they will be bad.
I can’t imagine anyone who would say grocery store cake was bad who would not also say that carryout pizza is bad. And, yes, both would likely be eaten anyways.
BigT, you can go to the grocery store and buy a sugar-free cake. There’s always a big heap of it on the shelf since on any given day, there’s exactly ONE person in the world who buys one. Because Aunt Minnie’s coming to visit, and we all know she’s got the diabeetus!
In contrast, I have never seen a pizzeria that sells a “no salt” pizza. Because that would be horrible, and the universe will not tolerate such a thing.
So I wasn’t the only one.
I don’t think any food meets the pizza rule.
Chocolate might. I’ve had bad chocolate over here, some sort of dry, tasteless shit. Maybe it wasn’t even chocolate! shudder The mind boggles. But how do you screw up chocolate?
Flip that for me - way more bad pizza than bad cakes. Chicago restaurants, for whatever reason, have this thing where they think a thing makes the thing a thing, rather than a process making the thing. Like barbecued chicken is not barbecued, but fried chicken with barbecue sauce poured over it. Because someone, somewhere, asked “Do you have barbecued chicken?” “Wuzzat?” “Chicken, but it’s made with barbecue sauce.” <Squirts barbecue sauce on fried chicken order> “There ya go buddy!” “Umm, thanks…” “Mama, change the menu, we gotta new special!”
So any pizza that you can think of that is slightly different than crust, tomato sauce, cheese, toppings - picture it going thru the same process. Bad pizza. My last one was, coincidentally, a barbecue chicken pizza from Jet’s Pizza on Ashland. Yep, they just squirted bbq sauce on top, those culinary pragmatists - in fact, they drowned it. There was a much barbecue sauce on top as tomato sauce underneath; it was a puddle. In all fairness, they made me another pie, but they were really puzzled about what my problem was.
That’s the only bad pizza I’ve ever had - they used barbecue sauce instead of tomato sauce. And it wasn’t in the South, either - it was up in St. John’s Newfoundland. I don’t even know if it really qualified as pizza, but they were trying, bless their retarded hearts.
The pizza rule is pretty much true for me. I have had some pretty marginal pizza, though, so it’s not an absolute.
Cake has no comparison. As far as I’m concerned, cake itself is always bad. It’s a delivery system for frosting. If the frosting is good enough, then the cake will be good overall unless it’s overly dry or dense. Good frosting is either based on cream cheese or butter. If the frosting is bad (like the Crisco-based crap you often get at grocery store bakeries) then there’s nothing you can put inside that will make it good.
I’ve pretty much always felt this way. Even at my elementary-school birthday parties, I would request a berry pie rather than cake.
Cake? No thank you.
My stance has always been that I don’t necessarily dislike cake, but rather 99% of all cake sucks. Dry, hyper-sweet, dense as a brick, covered in a half inch of frosting, I just don’t understand why people think that shit is good. That crap out of the Betty Crocker box is the worst. Store bought sheet cakes aren’t much better. Made from scratch from Grandma’s recipe? No thank you; apparently nobody’s grandmother knew shit about baking. And don’t even get me started on German chocolate (“I’d like some chocolate cake, but could someone vomit on it first?”).
OTOH I’ve had bad pizza, but 99% of pizza I’ve ever had has been at least non-offensively edible.