Woman Bakes Stepdaughter a Birthday Cake, Decides to Throw It Away Later

• A woman wondered whether she was harsh for throwing away the birthday cake she baked for her stepdaughter after finding out she messed with it.
• The woman's teenage daughter had been messing with the woman's cooking in the past month, and this was the last straw.
• After showing her husband proof, the woman discovered the issue was a lot deeper than she thought it was.

A woman dealt with her stepdaughter's antics for three years before finally deciding to do something about it. Her stepdaughter, Emilie, lived with her and her husband 50% of the time.

Initially, when Emilie was 14, they had a long conversation about how to make living together a smooth transition. The woman wasn't allowed to discipline her stepdaughter. If she had an issue with her, she had to tell her husband and he would handle it.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be difficult for the woman. Every time Emilie was around her dad, she was sweet as can be. However, when she was alone with her stepmom, she would change her attitude.

Emilie and Her Stepmother Did Not Get Along

Three years into living together, Emilie found a new way to mess with her stepmother: ruining her cooking. Whenever the woman would cook, Emilie would dump something into it so it would taste bad.

"Her favorite thing for her to do at the moment is ruin my food…My husband knows and asked about it, but he won't discipline her without proof. So I set up a mini camera in the kitchen," the stepmother explained.

It was her stepdaughter's birthday and the woman decided to bake her a birthday cake. She intended to surprise her stepdaughter with it before she went back home to her mom for her actual birthday.

As the woman suspected, after she put the cake in the oven and left the kitchen, her stepdaughter came in and dumped salt on top of the cake. This time, the woman caught the incident on video, with the camera she hid in the kitchen.

Determined to teach her stepdaughter a lesson, the woman took the cake and threw it. She told her stepdaughter that it was her birthday cake that she ruined, and because of what she did, she wasn't going to bake her another.

But rather than apologizing, the girl went to her dad and accused her stepmom of messing up the cake and refusing to fix it. When the woman's husband came home from work, he was livid, thinking she didn't want to make his daughter a cake. So she showed him the video, hoping it would calm him down.

But instead of siding with his wife, the father was even more angered that she decided to record the incident. She argued that it had been going on for a while, and he wouldn't do anything without proof.

People close to the family started guilt-tripping the woman for what she did. She wondered whether she was actually wrong and whether she should redo the cake.

They Uncovered the Reason for Emilie's Behavior

After posting the story on Reddit, people assured the woman that she wasn't at fault. They slammed the woman's husband for siding with his daughter despite her being wrong.

The woman clarified that shortly after posting on Reddit, her husband apologized to her. He admitted that he was afraid to lose his kid if he became too strict with her.

However, wanting to keep his wife as well, he talked to his daughter, after which Emilie apologized to her stepmom and admitted she had been doing those things because of her mom.

The man's ex-wife had issues with him marrying a woman five years younger than she was. She also didn't appreciate them being a happy family, so she asked her daughter to step in and try to ruin the marriage.

Suddenly, it all made sense to the woman. She saw her stepdaughter take a photo of the cake after dumping salt on it but thought nothing of it. She realized she had sent it to her mom.

After discovering this, the woman's husband asked her to write a list of everything she could remember Emilie doing on behalf of her mom, and they would go through a mediator to fix things once and for all.

As for Emilie, her dad finally decided to discipline her. He grounded her for a month, and she was required to cook four times a week for the family.

Emilie agreed to her punishment with grace. Her stepmother is hopeful that they will finally be able to turn their relationship around before deciding on whether their marriage is as salvageable as she thought it was.

What do you think of the woman's situation? If you were in her shoes, what would you have done?

In a similar story, a dad canceled an impending family vacation after learning his stepdaughters connived to exclude his daughter from the trip. Click here to find out what happened.