Cake or Pie? This must be settled.

[Zarathud]

Where are you guys getting bad cake? Anything cooked poorly is going to taste bad.

I have had good bakeries nearby and an aunt who makes (sweet) cake for her business.

[LordMortis]

It would seem pretty easy for someone to bake a dry cake/let it dry out quickly as the most common bad cake and then there's cake served gratis at places that is almost always of a pretty low quality. Cake is much less forgiving of not being high quality than is pie where even a pretty bad crust can be largely overcome by standard pie innards.

Cake wouldn't even be in the same conversation as pie because it's so difficult to hit really good cake heights except brownies are practically a form of cake and brownies make it soooo easy to hit really good heights and they don't even need frosting like 95%+ cakes do to make them excellent.

[em2nought]

Back when we had Food Lion grocery stores there used to be an Oregon Farms brand carrot cake in one of those long low pans like Sara Lee uses. That carrot cake from the freezer section was the best.

[Rumpy]

Where are you guys getting bad cake? Anything cooked poorly is going to taste bad.

It's not so much that the cake is bad, but sometimes the icing is so sickingly sweet as to be a turnoff. The quality of the icing makes a big difference.

[Holman]

A great cake is great, and a great pie is great. To judge between the genres, we have to consider the OK-but-not-great cases.

A merely OK cake is basically a sweet piece of bread with some kind of sugar edging. A merely OK pie, meanwhile, still has variety in its experience of textures and a greater distinction between crust and filling.

[Jeff V]

Pie because there are way more savory pies than savory cakes.

Like hair pie...mmmmm

I can make very good pies. Cakes? Not so much.