Most people have probably heard of or seen the show “Is it cake?” on Netflix. It’s a game show where contestants work to create cakes that resemble everyday objects. The harder it is to tell the difference between your cake and the real object, the better. But this concept has expanded past the show and become a challenge for people all over the country. It has even expanded onto our very own campus here at Eastern University.
Students here have taken this challenge to the next level. Instead of just creating cakes that look like everyday objects, they are actually hiding them on campus to see if anyone notices. The goal of the challenge here is to go the longest amount of time possible before people notice it is actually cake.
People discovered the campus version of this challenge had migrated to Eastern when complaints about old food smells surfaced. One of our library staff members was the first to notice, “I was doing the library head count one night, when I walked past the second-floor shelves and smelt something rancid. It took a lot of searching but eventually I found something rotting on the bookshelf. It appeared to be some sort of cake shaped like a book”.
Now library staff aren’t the only people who have begun to notice. Some students have reported smelling rotting food coming from classrooms in both McInnis and Centennial. Teachers have even started to notice the cakes in their offices. One teacher even said, “I walked into my office and at first didn’t notice anything was wrong. Then I sat down in my chair, and it immediately fell apart and I was covered in icing. Some students had replaced my chair with a cake overnight.”
Some of the competing students have begun attempting to sabotage other competitors by eating their hidden cakes. These students have started to spend all their free time searching for other people’s cakes on campus. One student was even reported having been seen attempting to eat a stapler that they thought was cake. When asked why they did this, they stated “I thought I noticed a scratch on the side that meant faulty icing work. But it was actually just a scratch.”
Rumor has it that the original cake hider’s cake has still not been found anywhere on campus. It was said that the challenge began in January right after winter break. By now you would expect there to be a smell around the hidden cake but still no one has found it. Campus staff are not very happy with this rumor because this means that when the cake is finally found it will not be an easy cleanup. In actuality they are not happy with this challenge in general as it has created more work for them than expected. “Cleaning up rotten cakes is not an easy task. They stick to everything around them and no amount of Febreze really gets rid of the smell,” our housekeeping team stated.
No one knows how long this challenge will last or how they will determine a winner. But what people do know is that for now, here at Eastern, before picking up any objects, always ask yourself, “is it real or is it cake?”
