We're of the opinion here at Pocket Gamer that the really fun thing about cakes is eating them, but we're open-minded about the appeal of baking them too.
Even so, the continued success and popularity of cooking titles on mobile formats is puzzling beyond measure - especially when entries as vapid as Deluxe Cafe appear to represent the pinnacle of the genre.
Lacking the depth and charm of Kariosoft's Cafeteria Nipponica, Deluxe Cafe is very much like your typical city-centre yuppie eatery - it boasts an attractive facade which conceals a bland and soulless experience beneath.
All you can eatThe objective is straightforward - you open up a cafe and start selling cakes. To begin with you only have one cake type, but you can create your own masterpieces and customise them to your own personal taste.
Completing various goals allows you to level-up and gain access to more ingredients, in turn increasing the number of cakes you can create. Later on, you'll gain access to ice creams - although, somewhat bizarrely, these continue to be prepared in the same red-hot ovens used to bake your other items.
Peripheral concerns - such as decorating your establishment, installing new furniture, and forcing other players to become 'friends' via a hopelessly clunky menu system - soon crowd in, and it doesn't take long for you to hit the dreaded freemium brick wall.
Let them eat cakeCertain upgrades can only be obtained using gems, and these are predictably hard to come by. You can earn them by downloading other apps or buy them outright via an in-app purchase.
Unlike many other free-to-play titles, there's really no alternative here - if you want to get anywhere in Deluxe Cafe's cutthroat world of confectionery, you're going to have to reach for your wallet.
That's no bad thing in itself, but in a game this anaemic the incentive to dip into your real-world cash reserves is extremely small.
When done well, free-to-play games can be really special. Sadly, Deluxe Cafe fails on almost every level. The presentation is decent, but everything else about it is likely to give you an upset tummy.