When Tina Fey recommended we stay home and eat sheetcake in response to white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies being scheduled across the U.S., one Bay Area confection lover had another idea. They decided to take back the cake, and asked East Bay bakery Ashley Shotwell Cakes to make the ‘Kill Nazis’ cake seen above as a sort of coping mechanism against Sunday’s unpleasantness in Berkeley. But cake baker Ashley Shotwell, who looks fabulous, has had a pretty tough couple of days since posting a Facebook video, as the Chronicle reports her page turned a troll magnet for online harassment, hateful comments, and hundreds of toxic fake reviews.
Our story begins two weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of the of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rallies and attacks. Here in the Bay Area, someone commissioned the ‘Resist Fascism’ cake seen in the timelapse Facebook video above. That video has since enjoyed nearly 9,000 views and about 800 shares, inspiring one customer to request ‘Kill Nazis’ cake.
“I was like, ‘Why not?’ I didn’t even think twice about it,” Shotwell told the Easy Bay Express. She made the cake and posted her signature time lapse video on Wednesday afternoon last week. But within hours a few hours, Shotwell’s Facebook page had tuned into a cesspool of online harassment, misogynistic memes, and hundreds of blatantly false one-star reviews from all over the country.
“They were saying there were maggots in the cake, it was spoiled, there was a rat in the cake, a bike lock in the cake,” she said. “They were all fake. Some complained about bad customer service in my bakery but I don’t even have a storefront.”
The negative reviews have now pretty much been scrubbed from the Ashley Shotwell Cakes Facebook page but the ‘Kill Nazis’ cake video has been removed as well. You can, however, still see the ‘Kill Nazis’ cake video on Instagram embedded at the top of this post.
It does not sounds as if Shotwell is willing to make another ‘KiIl Nazis’ cake, even if you ask nicely. "I'd probably suggest it say 'Punch Nazis' instead," she told the Chronicle.
