Box Vox

packaging as content

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March 24, 2011

Cake & Kleenex Boxes

2CakeBoxes4KleenexCakeBoxTop left photo: from TheCraftyBuffet; top right from: TheGirlyGirlCooks

We’ve seen these prism-shaped Kleenex boxes before. Once as sliced fruit (“Perfect Slice of Summer”); once as felted tissue box covers for Christmas.

Recently they used the wedge-shaped boxes to represent 3 slices of cake and one slice of cherry pie (“Divine Desserts”). Here, as with the fruit slice boxes, the Illustrations were done by Hiroko Sanders whose “attention to detail in cake texture and decoration,” we are told, “came from hours of research in bakeries and her own kitchen.”

These boxes may be the perfect shape to represent a slice of cake, but as tissue packaging, the connection seems more than a little tenuous. (In contrast, say, to Martha Stewart’s cake-shaped cake-mix boxes.)

KleenexCakes And yet… there may be something at work here that we don’t fully understand.

Remember last year when we looked at package-shaped cakes? Well, tissue boxes are among those consumer packaged goods that also exist in cake-form. There are, in fact, many people who celebrate Birthdays and other holidays with cakes shaped like Kleenex boxes.

Some prefer their Kleenex cakes with branding intact. (As the two cakes on the right will attest… upper cake, from CakeCentral.com; lower cake, from CelebratewithaCake.com)

Others want their cake to be of the debranded, domestically-enhanced type. For those people, there are tissue box cakes, frosted not with logos, but with edible tissue box cozies. (See: Kleenex Christmas Packs)

Normal_KleenexBoxCakefrom CakeCentral.com

TWiNKiE-Chan

Which now brings us to Twinkie Chan who crochets tissue box cozies (example on left) that resemble pieces of cake.

What sort of cake would she prefer? Her birthday cake (made by Debbie Does Cakes) is what you see on the right. As she explains it in her 2009 blog entry…

“It’s a cake modeled after my Layer Cake Tissue Cozy….so it’s a real cake that’s supposed to look like a fake cake.”

Put another way: it’s a cake disguised to look like a tissue box wearing a crocheted cake disguise.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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