My Take on Tom's Cake

Yes, I made the viral coconut white chocolate cake and you should too.

The viral Tom Cruise coconut cake

Did recipes go “viral” before the internet? Or more specifically before Instagram? I believe so, yet the effect wasn’t quite so immediate. There have been famous cakes like the New York Times’ famous Plum Torte, still today their most requested recipe of all time. Amanda Hesser’s Dump-it Cake was also wildly popular, as were the famous Katherine Hepburn brownies.

For sure there were viral savoury recipes too, surely more by Yotam Ottolenghi of late than Paul Bocuse, though let’s not forget that Bocuse’s puff-pastry capped vegetable soup with truffles (Black Truffle Soup VGE—Valéry d'Estaing) was certainly viral in its time.

But with the coming of Instagram and TikTok, so too came a new influx of viral recipes ranging from the feta and cherry tomato pasta bake (which actually caused a glut of Feta world-wide) to the latest craze of cucumber salads thanks to Ottawa native Logan Moffitt–aka @logagm. And these weren’t recipes you’d find in a book or newspaper column, these recipes become viral within days or even hours of appearing on the “gram.”

I recall a food conference that I attended in 2000 where then New York Times writer Amanda Hesser (founder of the excellent site Food52 and author of the viral cake recipe above) was asked where and who she turned to to identify the latest food trends. Her answer went something like this, “Well, if I’m looking or asking about the latest food trends, I’m already too late.” So true, because if you’re perusing food blogs for the latest trends, you’ve missed the boat. The latest food trends are happening tomorrow, not yesterday.

Anyway, the fun part for me (someone who thought that macarons would never catch on) isn’t predicting food trends as much as trying out these viral recipes and figuring out whether they merit the fuss. I hear great things about the cucumber fellow, and I really loved the Greek frappé coffee, but I had a go at the feta tomato bake and no thanks, it’s overwhelmingly rich to my taste.

One of the latest viral recipe has been the Tom Cruise coconut cake and if you haven’t heard about it you must have been living in a cave in the Himalayas because it’s all the rage. Now don’t for a minute think that Mr. Cruise has been baking up a storm. No, Tom has been gifting this cake, from Doan’s Bakery in Los Angeles, to all of his celeb friends for Christmas for years. Imagine Jimmy Fallon, Brooke Shields, Rosie O’Donnell, Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, James Corden, Angela Bassett and more of the star’s inner circle feasting on coconut cake over the holidays. And now you can too thanks to several copycat recipes that have sprung up over the web.

So in an effort to deliver a bit of the Cruise coconut cake magic to your kitchens, I took the deep dive into internet recipe land, consulted a half dozen recipes and came up with my take of this famous cake. It really is seriously delicious.

Oh and by the way, you can have a Doan’s bakery cake shipped to you but it will cost about $175 CND and should be ordered two months in advance. Meanwhile the food cost on mine is under $10.

The moral of the story: homemade is not only better, but ALWAYS cheaper!