London baker Reshmi Bennett has set what she calls an “AI cake policy” after a would-be customer sent an AI-written brief of more than 800 words to order a vanilla birthday cake for 10 people. Under the rule she shared on Instagram on Oct. 15, 2026, a cake brief can contain no more words than the customer’s budget in pounds.
TODAY reported the story on Oct. 22, after reviewing the full inquiry. The customer, who has not been named, had a budget of £100 to £150 for a cake Bennett estimated would cost about £600, and the order did not go ahead.
The 800-Word Brief Behind the Rule
Bennett is the founder and head chef of Anges de Sucre, a London bakery. According to TODAY’s report, the inquiry arrived through WhatsApp and asked for a two-layer cake themed around Kuromi, in three colors, for a 13-year-old’s birthday party.
Kuromi is a Sanrio mascot character who debuted in the 2005 anime series Onegai My Melody, and she is known for a black jester hat with a pink skull, according to Wikipedia. Themed cakes like this are a staple of kids’ parties, alongside the games and crafts found in a Frenz Hub list of birthday party activities for kids.
TODAY reported that the brief ran to 10 sections. The “Flavour and filling” section alone used 63 words to ask for vanilla cake, vanilla filling and vanilla frosting. Other sections asked for decorations placed “randomly but thoughtfully” and piping that was “elegant but subtle,” and the message included several AI-generated cake images for inspiration.
Bennett called the inquiry a “dissertation,” TODAY reported. The long message also left out the one detail she needed most: the budget.
The order lands in a wider argument about AI-generated content in daily life, from customer messages to children’s products. A recent report on California’s ban on toys with built-in AI chatbots for kids under 16 shows how quickly rules are forming around the technology, and Frenz Hub’s look at smart home trends covers how AI tools are moving into everyday households.
The Budget Gap
Bennett asked for the budget more than once before learning the customer had £100 to £150 to spend, according to TODAY. Her custom cakes start at £300 for one tier and £650 for two tiers, and she estimated about £600 for the requested design. The customer declined.
“£100 is a considerable budget for a birthday cake, but the brief needs to match the budget,” Bennett wrote. She added that the bakery’s ready-made cakes online start from £100, but said those prices do not cover the 70 minutes she spent reading the AI-written instructions, TODAY reported.
Home bakers who rely on clever kitchen tricks to pull off a party cake, or who spend December on the Christmas breads families bake around the world, know how much time careful baking takes. For a professional, that time also includes reading the order, quoting it and planning the build before a single layer is baked.
What the Instagram Post Said
In her Instagram post from Oct. 15, Bennett laid out the new enquiry policy: a cake brief may not contain more words than the budget in pounds, so a £100 budget allows 100 words. She asked that a few of those words be used to state the number of guests the cake will feed.
The post added that resending a brief on WhatsApp counts toward the word allowance, and that AI renders and requests to “jump on a quick call” would be assessed separately. Bennett also warned that “moist and delicious” is three words, telling customers to choose wisely, according to TODAY.
Bennett acknowledged the stakes for her business in the post. TODAY quoted her as writing that the new AI cake policy would upset customers and might cost her the business she spent 16 years building.
Commenters Split on the Policy
The post drew a divided response, TODAY reported. “People really have just given up on thinking and writing,” one commenter wrote.
Another commenter called the post mean-spirited, arguing that people with smaller budgets still deserve a chance to explain what they want and asking whether Bennett would have mocked the brief if the budget had been £850. Bennett told TODAY she would have been fine with the long brief in that case, because she would have been paid fairly for the time spent reading it. “Sadly, money talks,” she said.
A Pastry Chef’s View of AI Inquiries
According to the bakery’s founder page, Bennett trained in classical French pastry at École Grégoire Ferrandi in Paris and worked in Michelin-starred kitchens before founding Anges de Sucre. The page says the bakery uses Swiss meringue buttercream, Madagascan vanilla and British dairy butter.
Bennett told TODAY that AI-written requests are a new problem for her, even though she has made cakes from AI-generated images that clients supplied. TODAY noted a term for unreviewed AI content sent to an unsuspecting person: a “slop grenade.” The broader label, AI slop, describes low-effort content made with generative AI, and “slop” was named 2025 Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society, according to Wikipedia.
Bennett said she sees AI as useful for certain tasks but harmful to creativity. Ordering a cake, she told TODAY, should involve personal interest rather than a long essay produced in seconds that takes a baker hours to decode. “People love ordering a cake,” she said. “It should be a joyful thing.”
For Bennett, the message to customers is simple: a short, clear brief with a real budget gets a cake made, and the bakery will read every one of those words.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: CakeLovesMe – CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
