Last night, celebrity baker Duff Goldman—of TV’s Ace Of Cakes—tweeted that the cake at Trump’s inauguration looked suspiciously similar to the one he made for Obama in 2012:
From Goldman’s coy tweet, it’s a bit hard to tell just how upset he is about this act of apparent cake plagiarism, but even to an untrained cake artist it’s easy to see that these things are virtually identical. From the colors to the various tiers to the stars shooting out of the top, this is less like a studio copying a popular superhero movie to make a low-budget, straight-to-Redbox knock-off and more like a studio just making the same superhero movie with the same name and hoping nobody will care.
Goldman has since explained that he was impressed by the mimicry more than he was offended by it, and now the bakery that actually made Trump’s cake has released a statement about it. Rather than yet another company claiming it was simply doing its job and didn’t want to get political, though, this story has a fun twist ending:
It turns out that D.C.’s Buttercream Bake Shop was specifically hired to replicate Obama’s cake (which says some interesting things about how the Trump administration works), and rather than trying to avoid politics, they casually explain that all of the profits from the job are being donated to the Human Rights Campaign—an LGBT advocacy group. It may not be a flashy protest, but it’s brilliant nonetheless.