Then there was the wonky miscommunication that started it all. In May 2008, a friend e-mailed Ms. Yates a photo of a sheet cake that looked like a prop from “The Office.” It was not. Amid marzipan flowers, the cursive inscription was a profound reminder of the perils of ordering supermarket cakes by phone. It read:

Best Wishes Suzanne

Under Neat that

We will Miss you

One giant LOL and several Google image searches later, Ms. Yates was in the business of chronicling pro baking train wrecks. “People had been posting pictures of ugly cakes for years, so I just started collecting them,” she said. What began as an amusing distraction from her job as a faux finisher for the specialty painting company she runs with her husband, John, in Orlando, Fla., has snowballed into a genuine Internet phenomenon  or at least a serious time waster.

Image OOPS Cake Wrecks, a blog and book, chronicles edible errors. Credit... Andrews McMeel Publishing

By last fall, around 100,000 visitors a day were gawking at Cake Wrecks. More than a million people subscribe to Ms. Yates’s Cake Wrecks updates on Twitter.

“Everyone in the baking business follows Cake Wrecks almost daily, if only to make sure our cakes aren’t ending up on there,” said Mary Alice Yeskey, who works at Charm City Cakes in Baltimore and appears on the Food Network show “Ace of Cakes.” David Lebovitz, a former pastry chef at Chez Panisse who now writes about desserts from Paris, is also a fan.

“As someone on the professional side, you can see how these disasters happen, which only makes them funnier,” he said by telephone. “You take an order, leave it to one of your assistants to handle, and walk in the next morning and say, ‘Um, O.K. I think we have a problem.’”

Fortunately for Ms. Yates, an enormous number of those problems go unnoticed. She said she receives 50 to 60 Cake Wrecks submissions a day via e-mail, and usually posts between one and five photos each weekday morning. She posts only professionally made cakes (“It’s too easy and mean to go after your Aunt Sally’s cake wreck,” she said) and nothing excessively gory or obscene.