I Was Told There Would Be Cake

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"Ladies! Gentlemen! Everybody stop what you're doing for a sec. I have gained access to a cake!!"

—T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics

Cake — the ultimate reward. Seriously, it seems like in games one of the standard rewards you can give someone, other than gold, XP or power stars, is cake. It's sweet, it's lovely, it's something you normally only get at birthdays and weddings and it Tastes Like Diabetes. The perfect way to shrug off the stresses and worries of saving the world — cake.

Can overlap with The Cake Is a Lie, as long as the promised reward is cake.

And, of course, ever since the release of The Orange Box, the appearance of this Trope makes it inevitable that somebody will reference Portal's promises of cake.

This Trope page was supported by the Society For Cake Promotion

Warning: Stress relieving properties of cake are stated for dramatic purposes only. Overconsumption of cake may lead to obesity, increased likelihood of cardiovascular disease, Type-2 diabetes, and the accumulation of pink frosting on the tip of your nose.

I Was Told There Would Be Examples

Advertising

  • One rather dark ad for Chips Ahoy showed a talking, child-sized cookie at a child's birthday party, wearing a pointy hat, singing and everything. He asks where the cake is. She tells him there is no cake. Oh.
    • And here it is. If it is removed, just look up "Chips Ahoy Commercial Birthday" (without quotes).
    • For a real scare, listen but don't watch, and imagine it's a person and not a cookie.
  • Around 2000, AOL was running ads touting how improved the service was. In one ad, an AOL user brings a homemade cake into a cubicle-style office to thank the person responsible. The whole office becomes suddenly awake, with one woman peering from behind a wall saying "I smell cake!"

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • This line delivered by Volstagg in a Thor comic, upon arriving with a handful of other Asgardians at the Broxton City Hall, shortly after Asgard was relocated there (it's even quoted in Marvel Database):

"Excuse us...but we heard...we heard there was cake, and, well...what unfortunate day's events are not made gladder by cake?"

Film

  • In the So Bad It's Good Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando, intergalactic bounty hunter Shep Ramsay adapts to the suburban lifestyle with a mix of grievous bodily harm and property damage...but it's all against assholes, and is thus rewarded with cake. Shep is initially confused that Earthlings eat the stuff, but then tastes it and promptly wolfs it down.
  • In Office Space, Milton claims that at a previous birthday party (at which there was cake, but at which he did not receive cake), he was told that he would receive cake at the next party. That party occurs in the movie, and there is cake, but Milton does not receive any cake.
  • In Stargate: Continuum, O'Neill expects this as a reward for killing the last of the Goa'uld.

Literature

  • Sort of the Trope Namer: I Was Told There'd Be Cake — the chronicles of one woman's attempts to meet various unmet expectations, petty annoyances, imponderables and absurdities with only the occasional promise of cake at a wedding or some such.
  • In the children's book Big Max by Kin Platt, the King of Pooka Pooka offers Big Max a room full of rubies, a room full of emeralds, or a room full of gold for finding Jumbo, his prize elephant. When Jumbo is found, though (he was at his birthday party), all Big Max asks for is a piece of the birthday cake.
  • Cake was the reward in The Poky Little Puppy, too.
  • Cake is totally an obsession (and Trademark Favorite Food) in Stephanie Plum.
  • From the Discworld novel Night Watch: There is no more time, even for cake. For you the cake is over. You have reached the end of cake.

Live-Action TV

  • While temporarily in charge of The Office, Jim decides to celebrate all the office birthdays for the year on one day to cut down on expenses. The plan unravels when everyone demands their own favorite type/flavor of cake for "their" birthday portion. Except for Creed, who wants cobbler instead.
  • Boy Meets World: This is how Mr. Feeny and Cory convince Shawn to take the SATs.

Feeny (at Cory's urging): "Well, I suppose there could be... cake, or something."
Shawn: "Really? Cake?"
Feeny (scowling): "I don't know."
(cut to a scene later with everyone taking the test... with Shawn eating cake)

  • On Heroes, when Sylar kills a woman who can detect lies on her birthday, her colleagues enter her office with presents to find Sylar with blood all over his hands and a delightful smile on his face as he asks "Cake?"
  • Stargate SG-1's Jack O'Neill frequently mentions cake, and has invoked this Trope by name at least once.
  • In one episode of Burn Notice, Sam promises an entire office department of employees cake in order to lure them to a conference room where he could distract them with a motivational speech while Michael and his newest client break into a supervisor's office to hack a computer.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "Victory of the Daleks", the Doctor holds the Daleks at bay with the TARDIS self-destruct device. When the Daleks figure out that the "Self Destruct" was just a biscuit all along, the Doctor says "Alright, it's a Jammy Dodger — but I was promised tea!"
    • The reference being that the Daleks had previously been posing as domestic robots. One had indeed offered him tea. Made even funnier, that when prior to that, the Doctor was attempting to beat the 'Ironside' into admitting it was a Dalek. The Dalek answers the beating with, "You do not require tea?"
  • On Everybody Loves Raymond, a flashback to Ray and Debra's dating years has Marie learning that they plan to have sex, so she lures the family priest to Debra's apartment by promising him lasagna. When it becomes clear what's going on, he snaps "Is there even a lasagna here?"
  • On the Community Christmas Episode "Abed's Uncontrolable Christmas", the only reason Pierce takes part in Abed's therapy session is because they're serving cookies.

Music

  • "If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake, baked a cake, baked a cake..."
  • "MacArthur Park", written by Jimmy Webb and Adrian Drover, sung by... lots of people:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
 I don't think that I can take it
 Cause it took so long to bake it
 and I'll never have that recipe again...
 OH NOOOOOOO!

  • Cibo Matto's "Birthday Cake"

Recorded and Stand-up Comedy

  • Eddie Izzard's "Cake or Death" routine.
  • George Carlin's "Refrigerator Man" routine, including the mystery of "meat cake".
  • Jim Gaffigan has a whole sequence on the power of cake, how cake can bring enemies together, how pancakes are mysteriously considered wholesome breakfast food, etc.

"It's Roy's birthday in the breakroom!"
"I always hated that guy"
"There'll be cake"
"...well, I suppose I should stop by and at least say hi..."

  • Whereas for Bill Cosby, even chocolate cake is a wholesome breakfast food.

"Eggs! Eggs are in chocolate cake! And milk, oh goody! And wheat! That's nutrition!"

  • Swedish comedian Johan Glans has a routine about how he's realised that he's getting old. One of the things that made him realise that was apparently that, when arriving at parties, he has started asking the host if there will be cake.
  • Patton Oswalt's "Sky Cake" bit.
  • Mitch Hedberg wishes that long hair didn't connote "drug user", but something else, like "an extreme longing for cake".

"Mothers telling their daughters, 'Don’t bring the cake-eater over here anymore. He smells like flour. Did you notice how his eyes widened when he found out your birthday was fast approaching?'"

  • Greg Behernedt refers to his love of cake several times:

"I will go anywhere if you say the phrase 'there might be cake.' Not even a definite... there *might* be cake, and I'm there. I would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, register somebody else's boat in Spanish, a language I do not speak, without ID -- for cake."
"I'm getting married in a couple weeks. Wanna know why? CAKE! There's a human sized cake at the end! Haven't you been listening? CAKE!"

Tabletop Games

Video Games

  • Super Mario 64: Mario saves the Princess for what must be the billionth time and what does he get? A bag of gold? 2^64-1 grains of rice? Grotesque sexual favors? No, cake. Cake that he was already going to get before saving the Princess...but that's enough. Apparently it's also enough for being framed for a crime you didn't commit and then saving the Princess. (Naturally, VG Cats has something to say about that.)
  • Portal uses the big contrast between the hell that Chell is expected to perform through and the pettiness of the reward of Cake as humor. It exaggerates this pettiness with the Room Full of Crazy's over-dramatic exclamation of "The Cake Is a Lie", and sends up the concept of video games rewards in general.
    • The whole cake thing came about in development, when the team sat down to decide what philosophy the game would be based around. After a while of thinking, someone suggested, "A lot of people like cake."
  • Splosion Man has a cake hidden in every non-boss level. 47 cakes in all. Getting every last one them nets you the achievement "Not a Portal Reference".
  • Cakes are rare healing items (that give a boost to both MP and HP) in Maple Story. They can, if I recall correctly bought from certain shops, and are very rare drops from cake-based enemies.
  • In Monster Rancher 2, your monster is rewarded with cake and a song on its birthday. If memory serves, it relieves stress and fatigue a fairly small amount while raising its weight. In at least one other game in the series, cake is a regular item with similar properties.
  • In The Sims 2: University, the Cow Plant uses a blatantly-fake-but-admittedly-tasty-looking piece of cake as a lure for Sims. When one of them grabs for it, the plant eats them. Then the owner of the plant can milk it and drink the dead Sim's life essence (which extends their own life).
  • In Mega Man ZX, if you speak to a certain NPC on your birthday (which is recorded in the DS' system memory), she'll give you a cake. It's an expendable item in your inventory that recovers about 8-10 bars of life.
  • In World of Warcraft, there is a hard-to-get recipe for "Delicious Chocolate Cake". Getting the recipe and baking the cake earns the achievement "The Cake Is Not A Lie".
  • Stated word for word by Sten during one of the possible endings of Dragon Age: Origins.

"Where is the cake? I was told there would be cake. The Cake Is a Lie."

  • Most Harvest Moon games have some sort of holiday that centers around handing out cake (or baked goods of some sort). In Magical Melody, this occurs on Valentine's Day. Your character can give out pieces and you will be given pieces by people who like you enough.
  • Each stage of Kirby 64 The Crystal Shards (except for boss battles) ends with the characters having a nice picnic, and you play a little minigame where Kirby can pick up some extra items. This includes a slice of cake that heals some of Kirby's health.
    • Cake can be found randomly in levels in most Kirby games.
    • In Kirby Squeak Squad, a stolen piece of strawberry shortcake is Kirby's entire motivation.
  • In Animal Crossing, a random villager will give you a cake on your birthday. It is apparently one of the few furniture pieces that raises your feng shui wherever it is placed.
  • Cake was added to Minecraft in Beta update 1.2 to celebrate the game winning Indie of the year. It's the most complicated food recipe[1] in the game, but the resulting cake can heal 90% of your health bar, and you can eat one-sixth of it at a time so you don't need to wait until you're on the verge of dying to ensure that you don't waste any of its healing potential.
    • When beta 1.8 was released, a Hunger Meter was added and all food items affected that instead of health. Each slice of cake restored 1 point of hunger, up to 6 in total. Cake became a bit impractical because of it.
  • In RuneScape's Thanksgiving 2011 holiday event, Turkey Protest, one of the turkey attendees seems to find the protest boring and is only present because he was told there would be cake.
  • In Atelier games, cakes usually have very rewarding cost-to-profit ratio (not to mention being a good recovery item by itself). In Atelier Viorate, you can fill your shop with cakes and then go adventuring without much worries about your finance.

Web Comics

Web Original

"The actual challenge of the fight is basically "Go here, then here, then Quick Time Event then win. Then cake"."

Western Animation

  • When Stewie Griffin and Olivia are Playing House, he complains that they have a "sexless marriage"; he thinks sex is some kind of cake.
  • In The Simpsons, when convincing her father to talk to her mother, Lisa lies and tells that Marge has made cake for him. And Homer still had to be told in the end there's no cake.
  • Cake is the focus of a string of related Codename: Kids Next Door episodes, wherein the KND enact various absurd plots to secure the Delightful Children From Down The Lane's lavish birthday cake — which the Delightfuls not only refuse to share with any other children, but cruelly torture them by forcing everyone to watch them eat it.
    • In one episode, the Delightfuls became Fourth Grade presidents by promising Woodrow Wilson, the kid in charge of counting the votes, a slice of their cake. However, the episode wasn't about the cake, which was only mentioned when Wilson confessed his wrongdoing to Numbuh 1.
  • From South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut:

Eric Cartman: "Tell them we'll have punch and pie."
Kyle: "But we aren't going to have..."
Cartman: "More people will come if they think we have punch and pie!"
Kyle (typing): "Punch and pie."

    • And then later, two of the kids attending leave when they find out that there isn't any.

"We were led to believe that there would be pie".

  • In an episode of Arthur, after the namesake character's father decided to make a cake for a theme party in his class, the resulting unusual-looking cake turns out to be a hit with the class, especially Mr. Ratburn. As Arthur gets his dad to keep making cakes for various events in order to make himself more popular, a Running Gag occurs as Mr. Ratburn appears at wherever cake may be present with the pretense of bringing a reading list for students. It gets to the point that he randomly appears at Arthur's house unprompted just for a chance to eat cake.

"Oh. Are you having cake?"

  • Xiaolin Showdown: With pudding cups.
  • In The Fairly OddParents there's a popular restaurant called Cake 'N' Bacon.
    • In the episode where Timmy Turner decided to run for President of the Student Council, Co-Presidents Tad and Chad offered a huge cake to sway the voters into their side. It backfired on them as everyone who ate of the cake became too sick to attend school during voting day. The only people at school that day were Timmy and Principal Waxelplax, the latter of whom said she was only there because she's frosting intolerant.
  • The Regular Show episode "Free Cake" is all about Mordecai and Rigby trying to get chocolate cake. They finally convince Benson to throw a birthday party for Skips, but in trying to get Skips they inadvertedly interrupt a ritual that Skips needs to perform to live forever. When The Powers That Be threaten to drain away Skips' lifeforce, Mordecai is forced to give them the chocolate cake in exchange for letting Skips live. In the end, they get cake, only it's vanilla.
  • In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Band Geeks", Squidward organizes a band by setting up fliers all over town, promising free refreshments. At the first meeting, Mr. Krabs asks "When do we get to the free food?", making it clear that was the only reason he came.

Real Life

  • As any college student will tell you, the easiest way to get people to show up to an event is by providing free food.
  • Let's be honest. It is the main reason guys go to weddings.
  • There is a popular cake design that features the Grim Reaper and the caption "Relax... I'm just here for the cake."
  • One message that can be found in fortune cookies is "A nice cake is waiting for you."


  1. ↑ 1) Collect wood. 2) Build workbench. 3) Craft wooden pickaxe. 4) Mine stone. 5) Craft stone pickaxe. 6) Mine iron ore. 7) Build furnace out of cobblestone. 8) Collect fuel for the furnace. 9) Smelt iron ore into iron ingots. 10) Use nine ingots to craft three buckets. 11) Use buckets to collect milk from cows. 12) Craft hoe. 13) Use hoe on grass to collect seeds. 14) Use seeds on tilled soil near water. 15) Wait for seeds to grow into wheat. 16) Gather three units of wheat. 17) Find chicken. 18) Follow chicken around until it randomly lays an egg. 19) Find sugarcane. 20) Collect two units of sugarcane. 21) Convert into sugar. 22) Combine 3 milk, 2 sugar, 1 egg, and 3 wheat to create 1 cake.
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