While cleaning up and organizing Branded HQ I found a handful of loose catalog pages that my good buddy HooveR sent me awhile back. They were from the 1987 Wilton Yearbook of Cake Decorating, and featured their line of pop culture cartoon figural cake pans. Since I’ve sort of been on a food-centric nostalgic kick of late I thought this would be the perfect thing to share.
Though I have plenty of memories seeing this style of cake pans in grocery stores back in the day, I was never treated to a cake baked in one during my childhood. It’s not for lack of asking mind you, just that my mom wasn’t keen on that level of preparation and patience when it came to birthday cakes. She always bought something at the store and put some special candles or action figures on my cakes. There’s still a part of me that kind of wants to track one of these down and do it myself one of these days…
I’m not sure if it’s the date when the catalog was printed, or if Wilton didn’t have a huge licensing department, but I was kind of sad not to see any Transformers or Star Wars cake pans in the pages. That being said, there are still some pretty cool franchises represented in sugar and flour, not the least of which are He-Man, General Hawk from G.I. Joe, Superman and Batman. I love how these came with plastic faceplates so that some sort of recognizable figure would emerge from even the sloppiest cake decorator’s piping tip. I also love that apparently Superman and Batman were more or less interchangeable when it comes to their cake-y bodies…
By far, the majority of the pans in this catalog were geared towards girls with Rainbow Brite, The Poppels, Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, Barbie, and the Wuzzles represented. Makes me feel like there should at least be a Thundercats cake pan in the mix, but again I’m not sure if it was licensing or when this was released. Can you imagine the fun that would come from piping out Lion-O’s red frosting hair!
For all those curious about getting some pointers on just how to go about frosting one of these beauties, here’s a spotlight on the Snoopy and He-Man cakes…
The weirdest thing about these cakes for me is the extremely sharp and spiky nature inherent in this style of frosting a cake. Granted, it makes it much easier to keep the colors from mixing, but it always seemed weirdly antagonistic to me. Is it just me?