It all began in 1994, on the set of ‘Interview with the Vampire’. Kirsten Dunst was 11 years old, and Tom Cruise was already a superstar. Thirty years later, she still receives the same coconut cake every Christmas.
It’s known as the ‘Cruise Cake’: a coconut bundt cake with white chocolate made by Doan’s Bakery, a bakery in Woodland Hills, California, which, according to Hola USA, costs around 126 dollars. Dunst talked about it in 2016 on The Graham Norton Show: “We call it the Cruise cake at my house. It’s the best coconut cake I’ve ever had in my life”.
The tradition also extended to her husband, Jesse Plemons, who worked with Cruise on ‘American Made’ (2017) and gets his own cake. In 2024, Dunst summed it up for Entertainment Tonight with one phrase: “We double up on our cakes”.
And Kirsten isn’t the only one. Glen Powell, Angela Bassett, Tom Hanks, Jimmy Fallon, and other celebrities have also spoken publicly about receiving one. Powell has even said that he organizes a small get-together to share it with friends when it arrives.