Dad's detailed instructions for daughter's birthday cake goes hilariously wrong: 'A thing of beauty'

Ordering a cake and asking the business you are ordering it from to follow your exact vision for it can often prove to be frustrating. Sometimes, we do not exactly get what we want due to some communication gap, but one dad was determined to avoid any unexpected mishaps when ordering a cake for his daughter's birthday from Costco.

However, his detailed instructions gave way to a hilarious product. A set of images shared on Reddit by a dad named Stephen Walker—who goes by u/FlipDemStocks on the platform—on April 2 gained a lot of attention with 110K upvotes as it left fellow Reddit users in splits. In the post, Walker shared the specific instructions he gave his local Costco store and the outcome of the cake.

He wrote, "Costco will give you exactly what you know you didn't need." He shared three images, summarizing whatever went down between him and the business. The initial picture shared by Walker depicts his request for a plain white half-sheet cake, without any writings or designs and a message to "please see back." In the second image, Walker included an isometric rendering of the cake he requested, accompanied by his instructions, which were to have "No writing," "No Designs" and to apply "Red frosting on the perimeter for top/bottom" only.

According to Walker, he quickly drew a cake outline using a black pen and then used his daughter's red magic marker to indicate where he wanted the red border to be. He told TODAY that he thought his directions and little illustration were foolproof and believed that there was no way they could mess it up.

However, Costco did mess it up in the best way possible. Although the Costco cake artist followed Walker's request exactly, the result was not quite what he had in mind. The cake artist replicated Walker's drawing precisely, including the black lines from the original sketch, using black frosting and placing it in the middle of the sheet cake. Walker's post of the same went viral and people on Reddit absolutely loved it. Walker didn't even mind the mistake, even though that was his sole responsibility for his daughter's birthday.

He said, "My daughter's birthday was actually on March 26, but we planned to celebrate it on the first of April. My wife took care of all of the other planning activities and decorations and all that, so I was like, 'All right, I'm in charge of the cake. I can’t screw this up. Right?’"

The error didn't seem significant as he had already procured a red cake topper to affix onto the plain cake. Walker added, "I picked it up Saturday morning and I was in a time crunch." He was confused when he saw the cake and even joked with the cashier, who offered to go back to the bakery, but Walker was in a hurry and refused. He said, "We were in a hurry, so I was like, 'Well, I’ll just scrape it off.'"

According to Walker, the celebration proceeded smoothly, except for the brief moment when he thought the cake might be a prank for April Fools' Day. Moreover, he intends to establish the humorous cake as a fresh custom. He said, "Maybe next year what I’ll do is I’ll just send the photo of the picture I took of the cake with my shadow in the background and send it to the same bakery, and ask, ‘Can you print this up as a cake topper?’" He added, "That’ll just be the cake topper, and I’ll just take a picture every year. So it’s like, a picture of a picture of a picture, like 'Inception.'"