Before I wrote for TheGamer, I spent seven years as a cake decorator. I went to school for it, I was good at it, and I intended to open my own bakery someday. Now, I’m a writer and am absolutely loving it, but though I’m glad to be out of that sugar-scented hell, it doesn’t mean I didn't retain my sweet tooth.
But food isn’t anything new in gaming, and neither, I realized in thinking about it, is cake. There have been some pretty iconic pastries in some of my favorite games — I was just destined to have a permanent craving for sugar no matter my line of work, I guess.
9 Stardew Valley: Pink Cake
I go through Stardew Valley phases every now and again, but the one thing I always remember about Haley, my least-romanced bachelorette, is that she loves Pink Cake. You get the recipe from the Queen of Sauce during the summer of your second year, and for just some melon, flour, sugar, and egg, this delicious delight can be yours.
Melon doesn’t sound amazing in cake to me, but the dessert itself is adorable. The description even tells you about the “little heart candies” on top, too. It’ll give you 250 energy and 100 health, so unless you’re determined to marry Haley, it’s a nice mining snack for yourself, too.
8 The Sims: All The Cakes Over Time
It’s tough to pick just one cake from The Sims series, because the game has evolved so much since I first began playing in the early 2000s. Birthday cakes have been a staple in aging up your Sims since aging was introduced, and the plus-sized patisserie offerings even sometimes came with sultry performers for entertainment, too.
Now, in The Sims 4, your baking options are so advanced that baking is its own skill if you’ve got Get to Work. Getting good at baking allows you to decorate desserts to earn a few more simoleons off them, if selling them is your game. You can make birthday cakes, wedding cakes, or a “just because I feel like it” cake. And in my opinion, those are always the best kind of cake.
7 Fallout: Fancy Lad Snack Cakes
Popping up in several of the Fallout games, any veteran of the series is bound to be familiar with these tiny treats. The packaging is different, depending on where you are, but the slogan stays the same one the devs borrowed from Hostess, regardless: “A big delight in every bite!”
The snack cakes are from before the war, so try not to think about how stale they are. But, considering Twinkies are infamously said to be able to survive an apocalypse, these little sweets seem like a fun real-life nod to the one food theorized to survive a nuclear war.
6 Breath of the Wild: Fruitcake
When it comes to The Legend of Zelda, my Link from Breath of the Wild survived mostly on Mighty Simmered Fruit and Hearty Mushroom Skewers, but it sure was a big one for the game. When cooking arrived in the Zelda series, it was a brand-new mechanic, and with 118 recipes to make in Breath of the Wild, fans quickly ran to their nearest campfires to try it out.
The Fruitcake was really easy to customize to your needs in Breath of the Wild, too. Regular fruitcakes could be made with pretty much any fruit, but fruits that grant abilities will imbue the same power into your pastries, too. Energizing for stamina? Spicy for cold resistance? Chilly for the opposite? The powerful pastry possibilities were endless.
5 Mario Party: Peach's Birthday Cake
This cake is quintessentially iconic for me — as a massive Nintendo fan, I’ve taken inspiration for my own elaborate birthday cakes from it not once but twice in my life. For my birthday this year, I baked a small one for me and the guy I’m dating, and we devoured it whilst playing the map from which it came in Mario Party Superstars.
The main map is the perfectly pink cake, with a Bowser cake as well that can really mess up your plans if you end up there. You’ll also spend your time planting seeds to grow Piranha Plants that steal coins or stars from your opponents when landed on, too — just try not to think about the science behind live, aggressive plants growing in a birthday cake.
4 Skyrim: Sweetroll
With Skyrim being as long-lived as it is, it’s no shock that fans have found several ways to turn aspects of the game into memes. Who could forget all those “arrow to the knee” jokes, or the way other web content and memes segue into black screens, followed by, “Hey, you’re finally awake.”
But, let me guess, the Skyrim meme you most remember is someone stealing your sweetroll. These tasty pastries are just about everywhere in the game, it seems, but they sure do look tempting with that big old mountain of drippy frosting on them. Really, I can see why they’d be a hot item for theft — I'd be taking them, too.
3 Minecraft: Cake
The number of Minecraft-themed cakes I had to make during my tenure at the bakery where I worked was ridiculous, but only once was I asked to make a cake that actually looked like the one from the game. In Minecraft itself, cake can serve many purposes: yeah, you can eat it, but stick a candle on it first, and you can even use it as a light, too.
Each one has seven slices for you to eat, so it's a good continual boost. Additionally, you could use them to lure pandas, raise the level on your composter, or even trade it to certain villagers in exchange for emeralds. Hope you wanted some versatility for dessert.
2 Super Mario 64: The Cake For Mario
Princess Peach starts you off with a sweet tooth in Super Mario 64, penning a gorgeous letter asking Mario to come to the Mushroom Castle with the offer of dessert. He arrives to find something amiss, and it’s here that the painting-based events of the game begin.
There are actually a lot of references to cake throughout the Mario games, and it seems established that Peach is something of a pastry chef herself. She’s also true to her word, too, because once you save her from Bowser in Super Mario 64, she rewards you with an elegant two-tier cake at the end, complete with berries and frosting and figurines of her and Mario on top.
1 Portal: The Cake
I can’t think of a meme more pervasive in gaming fandom than “the cake is a lie” from Portal; I didn't play it until adulthood, but I knew the meme in high school. GLaDOS offers you dessert in exchange for finishing the test chambers, and while you don’t get it right away, you spend the rest of the game hearing about the cake and how it’s a lie.
But, it turns out, it wasn’t — what looks like a traditional Black Forest cake is indeed waiting for you at the very end of the game. You can even get the recipe for it during your fight with the Intelligence Core, but given how nonsensical it is, with fish-shaped peanut butter candies and helmets made to stop babies from bumping their heads, maybe don’t take it literally. The cake might not have been a lie after all, but the recipe sure seems like one.