Following is a summary of current odd news briefs.

German bakery’s syringe cakes help the COVID medicine go down

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down at a bakery in the western German town of Dortmund, which is celebrating the year of the coronavirus vaccine with syringe-shaped cakes. It is not the first time Schuerner’s Baking Paradise has sold coronavirus spin-offs: last year, as household essentials vanished from supermarket shelves in panic buying, they created cakes shaped like newly-scarce toilet-rolls.