I don't know if this is what's going on with cakecentral, but I did something like this inadvertently many years ago.

We needed to have a CGI script handle all hits under a certain location, and for various reasons mod_rewrite wasn't an option. So I put something like this in an .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/script.cgi

I didn't realize until later I needed to explicitly set "Status: 200" in the script's headers. As far as browsers were concerned, everything worked, even IE, since the "error message" (our page content) was long enough to not trigger its built-in error message.