* Psycho Doughnuts' shop in California features staff wearing nurses' uniforms, a white padded cell and doughnut names like Bipolar, The Massive Head Trauma and Psycho www.psycho-donuts.com

A welcome update on the endlessly jaw-dropping Cake Wrecks blog - dedicated to "When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong" - which Stop the Week reported on in February: author Jen Yates is releasing a Cake Wrecks book in late October. As a teaser, here's one effort ordered by a customer - for reasons that shall forever remain unfathomable - and the baker's brave but stomach-churning vision. "What is it?" you cry. "Go ahead, guess," writes Yates. "Spaghetti with tomato-ey cream sauce? An ear? A cherry, Cheez-Whiz and regurgitation torte? Nope, nope and nope! Give up? It's a foetus-with-an-iPod pie!"

We weren't joking when we foretold of a cross-Atlantic cupcake arms race kicking off in July. To recap: the official Guinness World Record for the world's biggest cupcake was broken in mid-July. Then it emerged that a cupcake was unofficially constructed in Covent Garden, London, one day earlier, which dwarfed the States' effort (Guinness? Pah!).

Baker beware! Innocent items of kitchen equipment could land you in some serious trouble, as one poor man (not a baker in this instance) found to his cost. The item in question was a spatula - a pretty normal piece of kit in your average bakery - but clearly a lethal weapon when brandished at large or used in a not-for-purpose situation.

Are you a plant baker with a green conscience? Do you ever worry about what happens to all those plastic bread bags used to sell your loaves in the supermarkets? Are yours recyclable, for example? Or do they go straight to landfill?

Those Aussies, don'cha just luv 'em? Not content with calling us poms and the Americans seppos, they now have to wade into the argument as to who has the world's most bonzer cake (see STW July 31). As they would say in Strine, they big-note themselves that it's London to a brick they've cracked the world record, rocking up with a giant coconut-covered, chocolate-soaked sponge cake half the size of a Vee Dub.