11 Best And 11 Worst Cakes From Cake Boss

The "Cake Boss" boss Buddy Valastro has experienced his fair share of fame and controversy over the years, but through it all, he's kept baking at the now-famous Carlo's Bakery. A fourth-generation baker, Valastro grew up in the kitchen alongside his family. "My parents lived upstairs from the bakery, it wasn't just work — it was their lives and who they were," he told Community Maganzine.

Family remains central to Valastro's life and work. "Nobody's going to work as hard as your family or care the way that your family cares." His siblings, cousins, and children are frequently in the kitchen taking orders from Valastro or ogling at his latest creation. After 14 seasons and several spinoffs, Valastro is an expert at keeping viewers entertained by stretching limits and aiming higher than anyone thought possible. His cakes can be refined or ridiculous, but he puts his heart (and his back!) into each and every one we watch him make.

We took a look at the cakes that have come out of Carlo's Bakery over the years and found glorious masterpieces, as well as gross mishaps. While the Cake Boss thrives on over-the-top baking assignments, his extravagant flair can be detrimental at times, causing him and his customers more pain than profit. But when they work — and they usually do — his cakes are truly sights to behold.

These are the best and worst cakes we've seen on "Cake Boss." 

When Buddy Valastro and his team are hired to make dessert to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, Carlo's Bakery creates an entire city block out of cake. The final product captures each tiny detail of this beloved childhood show, from the cobbled sidewalks to the piles of garbage Oscar the Grouch calls home. Valastro wanted the cake to properly commemorate Sesame Street's emphasis on interactive learning, so the cake portrays not only the characters of the show, but the letters and numbers they teach viewers as well.

At approximately eight feet long, the team had to transport the cake in separate pieces and then put it all together. "That thing would never fit through the elevator!" Valastro said. It all paid off in the end, when "Cake Boss" viewers witnessed the whole cast of Sesame Street gathering around the table to take in the delicious miniature versions of themselves. "I'm trying to contain myself!" said Cookie Monster.

For the 30th anniversary of NASA's Space Shuttle program, Buddy Valastro and his team made one of their most extravagant cakes of all time. The cake is impressive in itself: it contains each part of a functional space shuttle — an orbiter attached to solid rocket boosters and an external tank, frosted and seemingly ready for takeoff. But this cake is more than just frosting and fondant. As usual, Valastro couldn't resist going above and beyond (pun intended) expectation: this one flies. 

"The team equipped the cake with pyrotechnics and mounted it to a moving scissor lift to give it the illusion of blasting off." With its flaming engine and the American flag hand-painted on the side of the rocket, it's easy to forget this machine is edible. Thankfully, it never actually shot into space — Valastro's clever engineering allowed guests to see a rocket "fly" without losing their dessert to the stratosphere.

Buddy Valastro isn't all pyrotechnics and pizzaz — his technical craft and artistry is what makes his cakes so unique. There's no better cake to show off Valastro's fine-tuned detail work than the Leaning Tower of Pisa model he made for a wedding. The cake mimicked the Italian tower's medieval architecture down to each Corinthian column and capital. The couple who hired Carlo's Bakery stressed the importance of avoiding a "Falling-Over Tower of Pisa," but with the Cake Boss himself — and his team of skilled bakers — their worries were for naught. 

"It's like being an artist," Valastro told the New York Post. "You spend days painting a painting. When you finish it, you step back, you feel like you want to fall down, then you say, 'Look what I did with my God-given hands.' When I'm making cakes, I go into that zone, I don't hear nothing, I don't feel nothing, all my pain goes away." 

At over four feet tall, it wasn't quite as big as the real thing, but it certainly tasted much better.

When Shenandoah Conservatory, a music school in Winchester, Virginia, wanted to throw a party for their donors who helped them purchase 94 new pianos for their music students, they knew the only place to turn was Carlo's Bakery. The task for Valastro and his crew? Create a life-sized piano cake to feed a party of 700 people. 

"We've done some huge cakes. This one's probably top ten," said Valastro. And it was no easy feat. The team was understandably nervous to drive a giant cake balanced on three legs all the way down to Virginia, so creating a stable base was key. And then there was the issue of covering their massive confection with one seamless piece of fondant to replicate the smooth finish of a Steinway. In order to get a piece big enough, Valastro had to fully climb on top of the counter to roll it out himself. They steamed "the heck outta this cake," according to Valastro to achieve that glossy shine. In the end, the team delivered an impeccable Steinway replica, complete with detailed sheet music and all 88 edible piano keys sitting atop a stunning gold base.

This "Cake Boss" creation drew from the most unlikely inspiration: tax season. Buddy Valastro's accountant friend asked him to make a cake for his CPA employees who were being overly taxed by a brutal tax season. What better way to honor a group of people beleaguered by the IRS than with a life-sized replica ... of themselves? 

Buddy built his stressed-out accountant using brown derby cake, which is made with whipped cream and fruit. And in order to achieve that lifelike look, he had his staff pose in various anxious ways so he could get the body language just right. While the size and scope of the cake is astounding, it's the attention to detail that really brought it to the next level, from the look on the cake CPA's face and the crumpled receipts to the container of Chinese food, the post-it notes, the lifelike office phone, and the laptop computer. Anything that can make taxes seem appetizing is a win. "The detail of the person is just fascinating. I can't believe what Buddy was able to do," said Michael Lee, Valastro's accountant friend.

While most of Buddy Valastro's wildest ideas become delicious works of art, the hearse cake ended up looking more creepy than cool. Valastro should have run for the hills as soon as his client said, "I have a special idea." Instead, after a quick, incredulous, "What are you, a putz?!" Valastro and the team get to work to commemorate the birthday of an undertaker.

This cake features a pink hearse (we're all hoping the trunk is empty) driven by a chocolate version of the birthday girl. The scenery surrounding the car is a strange combination of zebra stripes and psychedelic flowers, making for a dissonant aesthetic overall. 

While it was a thoughtful idea, some vocations simply aren't right for being depicted in the frosted world of cakes — and an undertaker is certainly one of them. Luckily, the birthday girl appreciated Valastro's work, but it's hard to imagine anyone else enjoyed biting into a corpse's preferred mode of transportation.

The cake version of Wrigley Field was impressive — at 400 pounds and 25 square feet, it portrayed the infamous Chicago baseball diamond surrounded by hundreds of miniature fans. And yet, it still ended up tossed in a Dumpster outside the park. The infamous baseball stadium was celebrating its 100th birthday, and Buddy Valastro was tasked with giving the Chicago Cubs the royal Cake Boss treatment. Over the course of four days, the team constructed a chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate fudge dessert panorama, complete with edible players and fans.

But apparently, this one looked better than it tasted — the cake contained many base parts that weren't mean for consumption, and sculpting fondant that's hard enough to chip a tooth. Luckily, Valastro doesn't harbor any resentment for the demise of his creation — the Cubs "loved the cake," he claimed in the Chicago Tribune. "They felt bad those pictures of the Dumpster came out, but what can you do?"

Apparently it wasn't Buddy Valastro's idea to render his wife in cake form, but he accepted the challenge nonetheless, and that seems to be where the Cake Boss went wrong. For Lisa's 30th birthday, Valastro sculpted her — down to the dimple in her chin, each curl in her hair, and the diamonds around her neck — from fondant and modeling chocolate.

"I just want to share with you my vision of you," Valastro said to his wife as he stepped back to reveal his creation. He claims it's his prettiest cake, thanks to the beauty of his model, but the thought of biting into a chunk of Lisa's arm ruins the sentimentality a little. Standing upright at over five feet tall, the cake's frosted eyeballs seemed to follow Valastro's party guests around the room. Luckily, Lisa didn't seem to notice, unless her excessive enthusiasm was merely hiding her horror (we wouldn't be surprised if that were the case). But hey — it's the thought that counts... Right?

A spa in Hoboken, New Jersey, was holding an ugly foot contest, and Buddy Valastro was hired to make dessert — what could go wrong? The cake could have depicted anything even vaguely related to pedicures — polish bottles, filing tools, even nail clippers. It could have just been a regular frosted cake (Valastro doesn't quite understand the "less is more" concept). But in typical Cake Boss fashion, Valastro and his team dreamed up the most ridiculous idea possible and put it on a cake.

The bakers carved two human feet – one before the pedicure and one after. Even if the foot is sparkling clean, no one wants to see it on their dessert plate. But wait, there's (always) more — this cake also featured, in gory detail, a pre-pedicured foot, complete with warts, yellowed toenails, and cracked heels. The fact that Carlo's Bakery was paid for this one is a feat in itself.

During a Halloween episode, Valastro's team was approached by a woman named Betty who said she was a part of a crew (a horde? gaggle? a coven?) of actual vampires. She wanted a special cake for her "turning into a vampire ceremony," and naturally she needed a life-sized coffin cake complete with a man inside. You know, to symbolize a vampire's victim. The clincher? She wanted the cake man in the coffin to actually squirt blood when bitten. The double clincher? She wanted the man to look like Danny Dragone, one of Valastro's mustachioed bakers. 

Because this is "Cake Boss," the team took this odd request and ran with it, pulling off a final cake that was honestly a little too realistic. After delivering the cake to a cemetery in the dead of night, the team stood by and watched in shock and awe as the vampires descended on the cake and drank the "blood," which thankfully was just some sort of edible red liquid. In the words of Buddy Valastro: "Oh it's freaky."

Valastro was tasked with making a cake for a pumpkin carving company that specializes in over-the-top carved pumpkins. And in classic "Cake Boss" fashion, he took the theme and ran with it. The words "jack-o'-lantern" usually conjure up images of cute triangle eyes and maybe a toothy smile. But at Carlo's Bakery, apparently, a jack-o'-lantern means "the most horrifying face you can imagine carved into a pumpkin." 

Using modeling chocolate and fondant, the team created an impressive if disturbing cake, with lots of lifelike details that really did resemble the stringy, pulpy inside of an actual pumpkin. Unfortunately, the face they gave this jack-o'-lantern is so bizarre and, frankly, upsetting that it's hard to imagine anyone felt hungry after laying eyes on this baked beast. Like a cross between a Salvador Dali painting and Charlie Brown's worst nightmare, if they were going for scary, they knocked it out of the park. If they were going for appetizing ... pass.