“The most dangerous food is wedding cake.”
-James Thurber
There is a funny episode from the great TV series Seinfeld where Elaine, needing an afternoon sugar rush, sneaks into her boss Mr. Peterman’s college boy mini fridge and nibbles on cake hidden within. This cake turns out to be a vintage slice from the 1937 wedding of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson worth $29,000. After ingesting the cake, and learning the value of her afternoon snack, Elaine tries to replace it with a grocery store substitute from Entenmann’s but is caught on camera enjoying “the most romantic thing she’s ever eaten.” We are left to imagine the pain Elaine will endure passing the antique cake that has been “stored for six decades in a poorly ventilated English basement.”
This sitcom story is funny, but it couldn’t be true, right? No one has ever heard of vintage wedding cake, bought and sold for profit, passed around after 70-80 years, have they? Much to my astonishment vintage cake trading and collecting is a real thing. This story is strange, but true!
Evidently there is a common practice of decades-old wedding cake being bought and sold by collectors, with pieces sometimes fetching thousands of dollars. Slices of wedding cake, especially royal wedding cake, are often given as souvenirs. These sometimes come up for auction. Buyers with a taste for history often snatch them up. And lest you think we are talking about moldy chunks of dry plaster-like cake topped with rancid vanilla frosting, apparently royal wedding cakes are traditionally made of fruitcake. Fruitcakes are extremely shelf stable. And a piece from 1937 might be almost petrified.
In 2014 a piece of cake from King Charles and Princess Diana’s 1981 wedding sold for $7,500. Another Charles and Di slice sold for $2,511 in 2021.
In 2015 a Beverly Hills auction house sold slices collected by a former chauffeur of Queen Elizabeth II. He had saved slices from the weddings of Princess Anne (1973), Prince Andrew (1986), Charles – both weddings (1981 & 2005), and Prince William (2011). In 2014 a separate auction house sold another slice from Prince William and Princess Kate’s wedding for $7,500.
Recently, a slice of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding cake from 1947 sold for $3,669. It was purchased by Gerry Layton and is one of the last pieces of cake from this wedding in existence. Despite its rarity, Layton plans to eat it. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s confection was a nine-foot-tall elegant baked monster of a cake weighing over 500 pounds. It was cut into 2000 pieces. In 2013 another Queen Elizabeth slice sold for $2,300, auctioned by Christie’s.
And just like in the Seinfeld episode, in 1998 a slice from Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson’s wedding sold for $29,900. Initially valued at $500-$1000, the buyer, entrepreneur Benjamin Yin, explained he bought the cake for sentimental reasons. “It represents the epitome of a great romance – truly romantic and elegant,” he said.
With my curiosity piqued, I went online in search of vintage cake for sale. For the heady price of $3,400 I found a royal wedding cake collection set. This consisted of three rare slices of official royal wedding cake, each from a “landmark royal marriage.” One slice was from the wedding of Charles and Diana. Another slice came from the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips. The third was from Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s wedding. All are fruitcake, with special cream cheese frosting on the Charles and Di slice. The collection was offered for sale from the family of a former member of the Queen’s official bodyguard unit. Each piece comes wrapped in its original wax paper inside a monogramed silver presentation box with a signed letter of authenticity. If you are a royalist, or maybe just have an online shopping addiction, this antique cake can be yours with the click of a mouse.
The strange world of vintage wedding cake collecting seems like the stuff of fiction. Who knew it was real!
© 2025 Jody Dyer
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