Sherb Cake Strain: Where Its Pedigree Splits

Published on: 31/10/2026

Sherb Cake strain: one breeder, and a pedigree that reads differently depending on where you look

One breeder is named for the sherb cake strain, Seed Junky Genetics, and both of the databases that carry the variety agree on that much. Then each of them opens the family tree at a different place, and names a different pair of parents. The gap between the two crosses turns out to be smaller than it first looks.

Those two entries are the spine of this article. Where they need checking we have also read the Leafly pages of the parent and grandparent varieties, and one piece of genetics research, and each of those is flagged where it is used. What follows is what the records say, not what a listing wants you to conclude. One thing sits outside all of it. A breeder’s cross carrying a THC figure in the twenties is a recreational plant, catalogued as such, and it has nothing in common with the European hemp we sell beyond the botanical family.

Two entries, and two different jobs

The two records are not competing versions of the same document. They were built to answer different questions, which is part of why they diverge.

• Leafly counts. Its page is assembled from what raters submitted: a star average, tallies of selected descriptors, a short editorial description. Its structured fields for terpenes and for growing are all empty.
• SeedFinder traces. Its page is a genealogy, running back through eight or nine generations to landrace material, plus a short quotation from the breeder. It publishes no cannabinoid figures at all.

One is a record of opinions about a plant. The other is a record of where the plant is said to have come from. Neither is a laboratory report, and neither claims to be.

Two crosses under one name

Ask each entry who the parents are and you get two answers, both stated without hedging.

SeedFinder opens its lineage with Sunset Sherbert, in a BX1 backcross, crossed with Wedding Cake. Leafly’s description says the variety “pairs the Permanent Marker with Purple Push Pop”. That is four plant names for what is supposed to be one cross, and neither page mentions that a second version is in circulation.

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Read the Leafly prose and the gap narrows

Leafly shows those two parents as a simple diagram of two boxes. Its written descriptions, on the parent pages, are considerably fuller, and this is where the comparison gets interesting.

Open Purple Push Pop on the same site and its description gives the cross as “(Ice Cream Cake x Sunset Sherb Bx1) x Jealousy F2”. Sunset Sherb Bx1 is therefore sitting inside Leafly’s own account of the pedigree, in the same backcross form, though further back than SeedFinder places it: not a parent, but a parent of one of the crosses that produced a parent.

Permanent Marker, the other parent, is described on Leafly as “(Biscotti x Sherb Bx) x Jealousy”. Sherb again. And Jealousy, which appears in both of those crosses, is described on its own page as Sherbert Bx1 crossed with Gelato 41.

So the two entries do not describe unrelated plants. They place the same two ancestors at different depths, and Leafly’s simplified diagram hides material that Leafly’s own prose supplies. That is a real difference in what each record puts in the front row. What the overlap does not settle is whether the two crosses are two accounts of one plant or two plants sharing a name, and neither entry says.

What the name matches, and where that habit breaks

Read the name on its own and it points one way. Sherb is the everyday short form of Sherbert, Cake the everyday short form of Wedding Cake, and those are the two names SeedFinder puts first.

In our view that correspondence is worth noticing and is not worth more than that. Neither page says the name was taken from its parents, and a name that fits a cross is not evidence about the cross.

The habit is inconsistent anyway, and one of the plants in this very tree shows it. Ice Cream Cake carries Wedding Cake in its own cross, so the Cake in its name has something behind it. Sunset Sherbert does not work that way at all: Leafly lists its parents as GSC and Pink Panties, and neither of those is a sherbet.

Where both entries land in the same place

On classification the two records agree, which after the pedigree section is a small relief.

Leafly files the plant as an Indica, in both of the fields it uses for classification, with no split percentage attached. SeedFinder opens its summary line with “Sherb Cake is an mostly indica from Seed Junky Genetics”, and adds that it can be cultivated indoors and outdoors.

Indica and mostly indica are not identical claims, and the difference matters less than it looks, because neither entry is reporting a measurement. If you want the labels themselves unpacked, our note on indica, sativa and ruderalis sets out what they do and do not carry.

Berries and gas: two ways of describing a smell

Each entry describes how the plant smells and tastes, and they use incompatible methods to do it.

SeedFinder quotes the breeder. The description says the variety “tastes like berries with tropical and vanilla undertones, with smell notes of pepper, earth, and pine”. One voice, the breeder’s own, with nothing behind it but the breeder’s word.

Leafly counts instead. Its tally records the flavours its raters selected, which is a narrower thing than a smell, and it looks like this:

Fifteen descriptors share twenty selections between them, and nothing reaches three. Read as a profile that is far more weight than the numbers can carry.

Berry and earth are the only notes that turn up on both sides, and even that comparison is loose, because SeedFinder is describing taste and smell in the breeder’s words while Leafly is counting flavour boxes ticked by raters. Leafly’s editorial description adds the phrase “a heavy cake and gas terpene profile”, which at least sits comfortably beside diesel near the top of the tally.

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One cannabinoid figure, from one side only

Here the entries are not in conflict, because only one of them says anything.

Leafly publishes 27 per cent THC. Its fields for CBD, CBG, CBC and THCV are all empty. SeedFinder publishes no cannabinoid figures whatsoever, so there is no second reading to hold the first against.

That figure belongs to the recreational variety catalogued on those pages, and it describes nothing you will find in a European hemp listing. Our varieties are entered in the EU common catalogue and stay under the 0.3 per cent THC threshold harmonised at European level, which is a different order of magnitude and a different legal category.

The picture that was never taken

Both pages go quiet at the same point, and the quiet is easy to miss because one of them fills the space.

SeedFinder says it plainly at the top: “No image has been uploaded yet.” Its gallery repeats it. Its list of known phenotypes reads “None up to now (homogenous?)”, question mark included.

Leafly does show an image, and it is a generic one. The file it serves comes from its library of default flower illustrations, its count of user photographs is zero, and it has no highlighted photographs at all.

Click through to Permanent Marker, the parent, and the contrast is immediate. That page opens on a photograph of a real bud: purple and green, orange hairs, a sparkling white coat of trichomes. The credit under it names a farm, LA Family Farms, and a photographer, David Downs. Neither of the two Sherb Cake entries carries a photograph of that kind, or a credit.

The flower is not completely undescribed, to be fair. One rater on the Leafly page calls it light green and dense, in a single line. That is one person’s sentence, and it is all the visual record either entry offers. Whatever is left after a flower has been manicured, the small leaf and flower fragments that still carry resin, is sold as CBD trim, and there the name says what the material looks like.

Reported effects, and how few people reported them

Leafly’s effects section works like its flavour section, by tally. Relaxed leads with 7 selections, followed by euphoric with 5 and happy with 4.

SeedFinder’s equivalent area is empty. Its degustation section returns “No data available for this strain” for effect, for smell and for taste alike, which leaves the breeder’s own sentence doing all the work on that page.

None of that is a statement about our products, and it is not offered as one. It is a record of what a small number of anonymous people picked from a menu, about a plant sold under another jurisdiction’s rules.

The blanks the two records share

Set the entries side by side and what is missing from both is as consistent as what they disagree about.

• Terpene analysis is absent. Leafly’s terpene object is empty and SeedFinder’s degustation returns no data. “Cake and gas terpene profile” is a description, not a measurement.
• Flowering time appears on neither page.
• Yield, height, difficulty and growing medium. Every one of those Leafly fields is empty, and SeedFinder gives no agronomic figures.
• SeedFinder records that 0 of its users have uploaded a direct comparison, against 0 other varieties.
• No photograph of this plant, as above.

What survives is a name, a breeder, a classification, one THC figure, twenty flavour selections and two pedigrees that start in different places.

Nine ratings, and the 2,705 further up the tree

The thinness of this record shows up most clearly against its own relatives, all read from the same platform on the same day.

Wedding Cake has roughly three hundred times as many ratings. Purple Push Pop, one of the two parents only Leafly names, has three times as many, and 27 is not a large number either. Ratings measure attention rather than quality, and on that measure this entry sits last among the eight varieties in the table.

What the research actually measured

It is tempting to treat a pedigree disagreement as an oddity. Genetics research suggests the looser part of the problem, strain names, has been measured directly.

Sawler and colleagues genotyped 81 marijuana and 43 hemp samples across 14,031 SNPs and reported that strain names “often do not reflect a meaningful genetic identity”. Comparing samples carrying identical names, they found that in 6 of 17 comparisons, or 35 per cent, a sample sat closer genetically to material with a different name than to material sharing its own.

That study compared plant samples, not database entries, and it says nothing about Leafly or SeedFinder. What it does establish is narrower and still useful: a shared name is weak evidence of shared genetics. Two entries opening a pedigree differently is a paperwork version of a problem the laboratory work found in the plants themselves.

Reading a listing without over-reading it

The practical use of all this is modest. Notice which set of names a description puts first, because that tells you which record it lines up with.

A description that opens with Sunset Sherbert and Wedding Cake matches the SeedFinder entry. One that opens with Permanent Marker matches Leafly. That is a correspondence, not proof of where the text came from, and neither entry is thereby shown to be describing a plant that does not exist. Among the sources checked here, nothing settles which pedigree is the right one.

Listings also spell the name as sherbet cake strain, the same name written out rather than abbreviated, with the same question attached to it.

The wider habit is worth keeping. Assortments such as our CBD kits put several varieties beside each other, and the comparison that helps is the one in front of you. Not the one copied from a database entry nobody has checked against a second source.

For our own varieties the guesswork narrows considerably, though it does not vanish. Every batch we sell is analysed, and the certificate of analysis for a batch is available on request, which settles the cannabinoid figures. It does not settle a pedigree, and no laboratory report we hold would claim to.

Frequently asked questions about the Sherb Cake strain

What is the Sherb Cake strain?

It is a cannabis variety credited to Seed Junky Genetics on both of the public entries examined here, Leafly and SeedFinder. Beyond that breeder credit the two records open the pedigree in different places. Leafly’s description pairs Permanent Marker with Purple Push Pop, while SeedFinder gives the lineage as Sunset Sherbert BX1 crossed with Wedding Cake. Both file the plant as indica or mostly indica. Neither page acknowledges the other version, and among the sources checked here nothing settles which pedigree is correct.

What are the Sherb Cake parents?

That depends on which entry you read, and on whether you read the diagram or the prose. SeedFinder opens its family tree with Sunset Sherbert, in a BX1 backcross, crossed with Wedding Cake, while Leafly’s diagram shows Permanent Marker and Purple Push Pop instead. Read Leafly’s written descriptions of those two parents, though, and the same ancestors reappear. Purple Push Pop is given as Ice Cream Cake crossed with Sunset Sherb Bx1, then with Jealousy F2, and Ice Cream Cake in turn carries Wedding Cake in its own cross. The two records place the same names at different depths.

Is Sherb Cake indica or sativa?

Both entries point the same way. Leafly files the variety as an Indica in the two fields it uses for classification, without giving any split percentage. SeedFinder opens its summary with the line “Sherb Cake is an mostly indica from Seed Junky Genetics”, and adds that the plant can be cultivated indoors and outdoors. Neither classification arrives with a measurement or a stated method behind it, so what agrees here is two labels rather than two sets of data.

What does Sherb Cake smell like?

The two entries answer that question with different instruments. SeedFinder quotes the breeder, whose description says the variety tastes of berries with tropical and vanilla undertones, with smell notes of pepper, earth and pine. Leafly instead counts the flavours its raters selected, and berry, citrus, diesel, earthy and grape lead that tally with 2 selections each, with ten further descriptors on a single selection. Berry and earth are the only notes appearing on both sides, and the two are not strictly comparable, since one describes smell and taste and the other counts flavour votes. Neither entry publishes a terpene analysis, so both accounts remain descriptive.

How much THC does Sherb Cake have?

Only one of the two entries publishes a figure. Leafly gives 27 per cent THC and leaves its CBD, CBG, CBC and THCV fields empty, while SeedFinder publishes no cannabinoid figures at all, so there is no second reading to compare it against. That figure describes the recreational variety recorded on those pages. It has nothing to do with the European hemp sold on this site, which comes from varieties entered in the EU common catalogue and stays under the 0.3 per cent THC threshold harmonised at European level.