Cake cutting tools - GIFs and photos

[Jon]

The world of kitchen tools is extremely susceptible to gimmickry, and you can see it clearly in cake cutting devices. Is this a "real" cake cutting machine in this GIF? I don't know.



Legitimate industrial use of cake cutting devices does exist, but I believe mass-produced cakes are generally sold as complete cakes, and not sliced. Also, obviously, cake slices dry out quickly.

But wouldn't you want to "save time" and use such a tool to cut a cake that you serve to guests? For most of these devices, that would require you to cut the entire cake at once, and to serve each person an equally-sized portion. That's certainly possible, but - and this hit me yesterday at a friend's son's birthday party - the cutting and serving of cake is a shared celebratory ritual. Auto-cutting the cake would be like evenly cutting open a pinata and handing out 6 pieces of candy to each kid.

The common manual commercially-available cake/pie cutters generally take this form:



Obviously, these look like giant apple corer/wedger gadgets, which I think are excellent tools. But cutting an apple and cutting a cake, while physically similar tasks, are culturally miles apart.

Here's a pie version. Six giant pieces of pie? I'm not sure this cutter won't require a knife to clean up the edges.



Here we have a similar cutting guide. Possibly a pizza here? Called the "Equaslice", this one looks like it's used in a Communist nation to perfectly divide up a once-yearly pie among loyal citizens.



This concept of over-enthusiastic toolmaking is very similar to the Bottoms Up reverse draft beer filling system, that attempts to save us from the horrors of another important human ritual: pouring a beer.

Is there a reasonable, legitimate use of the giant apple-style wedger gadget? Yes there is:



Interestingly, when a watermelon is cut like this, instead of the middle section cutting out a core to be thrown away, it yields a column of the juicy watermelon center.

Previously:

PancakeBot pancake printer
Cake frosting GIF
Cake serving tool GIF