Eight-year-old Jacob Bertrand (left) poses with his father Mathieu Bertrand and a friend in a handout photo. His family ordered a Toronto Maple Leafs cake for Jacob's birthday and got a cake with a Maple Leaf Foods logo instead.Tania Levesque/The Canadian Press
A young Toronto Maple Leafs fan got a big letdown Saturday when a bakery mix-up left him with a birthday cake honouring a packaged meat company instead of his favourite team.
The boy’s stepmother, Tania Levesque, said her partner ordered the cake from a bakery near the couple’s home in Mascouche, Que., a few days before Jacob’s hockey-themed birthday party.
When the bakery said they didn’t have the Leafs’ logo, Levesque suggested the workers search for it on Google, noting they’d made the same cake for Jacob for the past three years without any issue.
But the cake was instead decorated with the logo of Maple Leaf Foods. The discovery hours before the party left Levesque “crying with laughter,” she said, but Jacob was less pleased.
“He doesn’t really know Maple Leaf meat products. He was a little confused, and when he understood and we explained, he said he didn’t want any ‘ham cake,“’ Levesque said in a phone interview Monday.
She said she has no hard feelings toward the bakery and said the cake was happily enjoyed by the rest of the guests at the party.
In the end, she said even Jacob came to laugh at the mistake.
“He really wanted a Maple Leafs logo, he’s a big fan of (forward John) Tavares,” she said.
Levesque declined to name the bakery, saying she doesn’t want anyone to get in trouble.
“I just want everyone to know we laughed a lot, and nobody is unhappy,” she said.
A Facebook post she wrote describing the incident had been shared more than 1,400 times as of late Monday afternoon.
Maple Leaf Foods responded in a tweet late Monday that it was sorry to see Jacob was disappointed with his cake, but that the company would send him and his family to a Maple Leafs game and would fuel them with Maple Leaf products.