What's the deal with video-game cakes?Gaming is a manly pastime. We can deny it all we want, but the majority of gamers are still male, and machismo plays a big role in the character of the American gaming community. All of which is to point out just how strange it is that this manly fan-base has picked up with so much enthusiasm on a traditionally feminine hobby: baking.
In recent months, online coverage of elaborate, game-themed cakes has gone through the roof. We've seen glossy Mario wedding cakes. We've seen decadently-iced katamari cakes. We've seen edible consoles, handhelds, controllers, even pixels. Everyone, it seems, has turned off their games, tied on their aprons, and headed to the kitchen.
Who exactly is baking these cakes? Some will claim -- and they may be partially right -- that it's not male gamers slaving all day over hot cans of icing, but their loving, more culinarily-inclined girlfriends and wives. After all, cakes like this don't happen every day; they get made for special occasions, like gamers' birthdays. But the fact of the matter is, guys are making game cakes, too. With more turning up online each day, they've become a point of pride. Nowadays, an awesome cake is definitely worth bragging points.
Why is the gaming community suddenly obsessed with cakes? On the one hand, it has to do with a handful of gaming sites who, having taken an understandable liking to cakes, have started reporting on them like news. Beyond that, it may be a matter of copycat crimes. Who would have thought to make an entire cake out of the Prince's tiny, pellet-shaped head until they saw someone else do it first?
For that matter, why do some games keep popping up in cake form, while others apparently prove inedible? Looking back, Katamari certainly takes the cake for frequency, with the classic red mushroom trailing for a possible second. And sure, these make for cute, colorful cakes (What it says about us that our natural response to cute things is to ingest them: that's a whole other column) but there are also a fair number of NES's, DS's, Gamecubes -- objects neither colorful nor cute, all sporting thoroughly un-delicious pointy edges.
Still, maybe a console just goes down easier than an actual game character. No matter how big a fan you are, it must be strange to eat someone's face. Then again, the whole game cake phenomenon raises questions about what it means to be a fan. Isn't fandom itself a type of consumption? Being really into something is about gobbling it up, about making it a part of you.
Not that gamers are the only fans who are into edibles. Sports cakes, TV show cakes, photo cakes: you see them all the time. Eating what we love is part of our culture -- from Mickey Mouse-shaped popsicles to Hello Kitty fruit snacks. But why has it struck such a cord with the gaming community? To find an answer, I've embarked on a cake-related quest. I'll be compiling images of game cakes, game-cake making stories, and, above all, accounts about eating game cakes. Odd, I know, but together we can get to the bottom of this tasty issue. So, if you've had first-hand experience with aforementioned cakes, please feel free to share!
In the end, maybe it's all for fun. Maybe the moment we cut into our game cakes and raise our forks to our mouths, characters stop being characters, consoles stop being consoles, and everything's delicious. And maybe this cake tidal wave is a sign that we don't want to be macho gamers all the time. We just want to be happy and eat the cake batter at the bottom of the bowl.
Bonnie Ruberg is a writer, researcher, and all around fangirl with a big crush on games. Find more of her work at Gamasutra, The Onion A. V. Club, or her blog, Heroine Sheik. She can be reached at
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