I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Katie, the “Tom Cruise Cake” From Penance

As someone who is chronically online, loves stress baking and has a big appetite for pop culture, I was stoked when my sister-in-law told me she’d stumbled upon a dupe of the fabled Tom Cruise Cake at Prahran cafe Penance.

For the uninitiated, the original is a white chocolate coconut bundt cake from Los Angeles’ Doan’s Bakery. Since word got out that Cruise sends hundreds of these cakes to industry friends every Christmas, it’s become a thing of legend.

Celebrities who’ve been honoured with Cruise’s iconic Christmas bundt include Tom Hanks, Mindy Kaling, Kirsten Dunst, Angela Bassett, Brooke Shields and a host of other A-listers. One cake even enjoyed a private jet flight from LA to the UK after journalist Stuart Heritage campaigned for Cruise to send him one.

The white chocolate coconut bundt at Penance is almost as elusive as the star who made it famous. “The cake is usually available Wednesday to Saturday … [but] not always,” says owner Stavros Fisher.

He says the baker behind the dupe wishes to remain anonymous and only refers to her as “Banksy Baker” (his quotation marks). He says she once owned a “rather well-known patisserie”. She now bakes, in Fisher’s words, “at her own pizzazz and labour”. So the cake is hard to come by and not always available.

Since the cake was added to the menu less than two months ago, Fisher says it’s been so popular that he and Banksy Baker have discussed doubling or even tripling the number of cakes made. If you want a slice, you’d be advised to pre-order (you can try your luck with a walk-in, but be prepared to be disappointed).

According to Fisher, the cake came to be after Banksy Baker tried to re-create the famous bundt using copycat recipes and was “abysmally underwhelmed” by the results. She made a new recipe, changing the base from more of a chiffon cake to something much denser made with ingredients “you wouldn’t think are there.” She then named it the “Katie” cake after Cruise’s ex-wife Katie Holmes who Banksy Baker says “has more gumption than Tom Cruise anyway”.

When asked to describe the cake, Fisher tells me it’s gluten-free and has a white chocolate and coconut exterior, then enigmatically adds, “the rest is an utter mystery sworn to arcane secrecy”. I’ll do my best to fill in the gaps.

Opening the cake box was a visceral olfactory experience. I was enveloped in a cloud of desiccated coconut and powdered sugar. On the outside, a thick layer of white chocolate icing is topped with a generous smattering of desiccated coconut, giving it a slightly retro charm that calls to mind a Baker’s Delight Boston bun. The icing is impossibly smooth and the sweetness is balanced by the nutty, chewy texture of the coconut.

Beneath the icing is a very dense but still moist vanilla cake that’s a slight departure from the original, which contains chunks of white chocolate. It’s sweet, but not cloyingly so. To balance it out, I suggest eating it with a cup of black tea or coffee.

The “Katie” cake might be inspired by a blockbuster name, but this version is more indie darling: quietly cultish, slightly mysterious and just a little hard to pin down. And as most of us won’t be getting a private jet delivery from Cruise anytime soon, a trip to Prahran feels like a perfectly reasonable substitute.

@penance.prahran