The birthday and quinceañera staple has a storied history—and an uncertain future
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, gaudy doll sponge cakes with elaborately piped technicolor buttercream petticoats and plastic Barbie heads were well-known staples at pastelerías and quinceañeras, often decorating bakery window displays. They were a backdrop to my northern Mexican upbringing in Tijuana, Baja California, and are a nostalgic memory I share with a plethora of Latinas: half edible, half decorative, and fully iconic. While these ultrafeminine tiered cakes are less common today, their origin and continued creation still hold space for nostalgia and memory.
Dolls topping cone-shaped layer cakes may have boomed in the ’80s and ’90s, but they are evidenced to have played a role in Latin American pastry decades earlier. In the 1959 cookbook Arte Mexicano del Azúcar, author Marithé de Alvarado writes about the tradition of the doll cake specifically for quinceañera celebrations. “When celebrating a young girl’s 15 years of age, it’s charming to present this cake with [a doll that] represent the characteristics that the young dame debuts in society,” de Alvarado writes. The book showcases a variety of cakes: Some dolls take the sheet cake’s center stage, sitting in a frosting garden with their legs buried beneath buttercream florals. Other dolls are made from pastillage, a sugar paste, standing tall on a tiered cake with a dress to match the birthday girl’s, with powdered sugar cutouts of leaves and roses and real baby’s breath flowers at the base.
The tradition of quinceañeras as we know it today in Mexico was influenced by the French culture of dances and elaborate dresses that entered the region through the invasion by France in 1862. During this time the French emperor’s wife, Carlota of Belgium, threw elaborate balls and dinners with desserts like sorbet, puddings, and cakes baked by French chefs, as described by Mary Amberson in her book Maximilian and Carlota: Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico. Predictably, the French influence was also greatly felt in 19th century Mexican pastry, from orejas (a take on the French palmiers) to cuernitos (a take on croissants).
The first recorded doll cake draws inspiration from the poem “A Corpse Going to a Ball,” originally published by American author Seba Smith in 1843, about a girl named Charlotte who braves a frigid snowy night in an attempt to travel to a ball by sleigh, only to (spoiler) freeze to death. When mid-19th-century Germany started producing miniature porcelain dolls, they morbidly took to calling them “Frozen Charlotte” in reference to the popular poem. Poor Charlotte was carried around as a good-luck totem, and German bakers angling to profit on the trend began baking them into cakes––similar to the three kings bread, rosca de reyes, and Mardi Gras king cake, which both hide a baby doll figure somewhere within.
When Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge was released in 1841, doll manufacturers began creating figures of the main character’s love interest, Dolly Varden, and the cake craze shortly followed. Dolly was a proper Victorian woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat and many layers of colorful skirts pinned up in a bustle, prompting fashion trends and even cake trends. While bakers didn’t recreate her exact likeness, the rise of “Dolly Varden Cakes” saw a surge in multicolored, multiflavored layer cakes that were often held together with jam. Around 1940, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother started a wedding cake topper trend in England of using bride and groom figurines that shared the likeness of the pair to be married. The cake style became an instant hit.
While the exact origins of the Barbie cake can’t be pinpointed, the first Barbie doll was released by Mattel in 1959. An immediate sensation, it likely boosted the already existing genre of doll cakes. By the 1970s, the cake decoration brand Wilton made crafting what became known as the Barbie cake, the fairytale cake, or the doll cake much easier. Wilton began selling a dome-shaped cake pan with a thin cylinder in the center called the Wonder Mold cake pan. This shape made inserting a doll pick––a pointy plastic pick that sticks out from the torso of the doll to stabilize it in the sweet bread––simpler. The cake pan also allowed bakers to achieve the dome shape of a skirt in one bake instead of having to cut and shape cake layers. Finally, in the 1980s, the first official recipe for a doll cake, known locally as a Dolly Varden cake, was featured in The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. The painstakingly piped cake skirt, of course, likely takes inspiration from the ornate, voluminously ruffled and draped crinoline Victorian skirt styles built up by boning and a bustle in the 1850s.
How exactly is a Barbie cake created today? Do pairs of legs lurk beneath buttercream, or do bakeries have a designated bucket with glossy, tippy-toed doll limbs sticking out, toe side up? Jannette Pastrana, the Puerto Rican baker behind cottage bakery Jannette’s Cakes in Willimantic, Connecticut––currently only open to lucky friends and family of Pastrana in Bridgeport, CT, and now operating as Jannette La Piraguera, selling Puerto Rican shaved ice in the summertime––laughs at my bucket theory, and promptly corrects me. She’s been making doll cakes for quinceañera centerpieces since the height of their popularity in the ’80s and ’90s.
“Usually the dolls don’t have legs,” she says. Pastrana explains that the dolls used for cakes typically end at the waist, with a pick that’s used to stabilize them into the sponge of the cake, aptly dubbed a doll pick. Wilton still sells doll picks, as do a host of other companies, though folks can also scour eBay for vintage pieces. However, because of the lack of diversity available among Wilton doll picks in the late 20th century, Pastrana’s clients customarily provided their own Barbie doll, legs and all, to visually represent the girl whose birthday was being celebrated. This required some surgical adjustment, whether to the doll or to the shape of the cake. Inserting an entire Barbie could destabilize the cake, so Pastrana typically removed the legs first. She started rethinking her method after a young girl, who was reportedly horrified at the sight of a legless Barbie after cutting into her cake, returned to Pastrana requesting that her next doll cake please have legs.
While this cake form has been widely embraced by coming-of-age Latinas for their quinceañera celebrations and other birthdays, it’s clearly a nostalgic cake for many around the globe. Abena Anim-Somuah, the voice behind the Cherry Bombe podcast The Future Of Food Is You and the author of the Your Friend in Food newsletter, celebrated her first birthday in 1997 with a doll cake in Ghana. “My mom is just someone who is really into birthdays and celebration,” Anim-Somuah told me over text. “It was my first birthday cake I ever had, and I think it was a big deal for my mom having her first child, her first daughter.” Anim-Somuah’s mom had noticed her love of Barbies and commissioned her friend to bake her a white buttercream doll cake with pink trim.
In Singapore, food writer and vegan baker Gan Chin Lin says doll cakes were a “staple” locally in the late 2000s and early 2010s. “I feel like they were part of a larger, now antiquated character cake vogue,” Lin shared through DM. She says the “waist-down” cake design, which featured a skirt or sometimes even a mermaid tail and often portrayed Disney or Disney-adjacent princesses, was popular at her female friends’ birthday parties. It always surprised her, however, that the Barbie was naked underneath the sponge and buttercream.
These famous doll cakes have retained relevance through the decades, as evidenced by this Reddit thread from last year titled “Who remembers the grocery store barbie doll cakes???” They are still available for purchase through cottage, local, and chain bakeries like Publix (starting at $79.99 for a blonde Barbie with a pink frosting skirt). Online, whether through TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, doll cakes continue to hold intrigue and excitement for bakers and viewers alike who showcase the creation process from beginning to end. From ultra-vintage-style Barbie cakes like Hannah Currie’s (@laretrorecipe) classic using a chic ’50s doll, to more modern doll cakes like those made by Mirvat Hachem-Osseili (@bakemydaymimo on TikTok) –– who focuses on Barbie dolls that reflect the beauty of little girls everywhere, like in this hijabi Barbie cake — the craft is alive and well.
As much as they still hold a special place in celebration and pastry, however, these cakes are simply not as popular as they once were. Even Wilton has taken notice. “Though doll cakes aren’t as popular as they used to be, we still see people have great heart for these kind of cakes, especially for birthday parties. Most often they are made into doll skirts decorated with buttercream or fondant,” the company’s representative, Kristen Agnello-Dean, wrote in an email.
This holds especially true for modern girls celebrating quinceañeras, who Pastrana says now ask for more sophisticated cake styles, like three-tier cakes with fondant. Irma Garcia, a custom cake baker located in Chula Vista, California, says she doesn’t get requests for doll-style cakes. Lately there’s been a spike in orders for tiered cakes, starting at three tiers and up, often reflecting the quince’s theme or just in an elegant and floral-decorated style.
Pastrana may have noticed the decline in Barbie cakes back in 2005, but she still has one devoted doll cake customer. “I’ve been baking her doll cakes every year for her birthday ever since her first,” she told me over the phone. That customer turns 21 this year, and she had planned a four-foot-tall cake with 20 miniature dolls from cakes past, some of which have been saved and some of which she would repurchase, all propped on one tall cake as the centerpiece. This pièce de résistance has been postponed, however, as the soon-to-be 21-year-old is going on a cruise for her upcoming birthday.
As for Pastrana, her love and nostalgia for the Barbie cake persists. Who knows? Maybe there is an order for a custom Barbie wedding cake in her future.
Photos provided by Wilton