In the mid-1970s, Wilton, a baking supply company, began releasing licensed cake pan molds. As with most things geared towards children at the time, one of the first licensed pans was Mickey Mouse, dressed in his band leader outfit from The Mickey Mouse Club House.
But it wasn’t long before other kid-friendly properties got in on the action, including Sesame Street, Holly Hobby, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and Bugs Bunny.
But things really took off for character pans with the introduction of superhero pans, like Wonder Woman, in 1977.
Although it might seem a little strange, these pans came with a plastic face. I can only assume this was because decorating the face would be extremely difficult to do with all that detail. The rest of the cake is made up of fairly large swaths of color, which, admittedly, would be tedious to decorate with a star piping tip, but isn’t too difficult to manage. However, trying to decorate with the detail required for the face seems like a pretty daunting task for most parents. And messing up the face would potentially ruin the entire project.
So, instead of putting that much pressure on someone, Wilton made a smart move and just included a perfect, plastic face that can be laid on top of the cake instead. Of course, now you have a separate piece to try not to lose, but I think for a lot of folks, these were mostly disposable, one-time use cake pans anyway. Most kids don’t really want the same cake year after year, ya know?
Along with Wonder Woman, Wilton also released a rather versatile Superman/Batman cake pan, one of which I recently picked up at my local library’s annual book sale – for only $5!
Wilton did something rather brilliant here by making the cake mold a generic superhero with a cape. By including the faces and symbols of both Superman and Batman, it’s like you have two cakes in one package. If you want to make it Superman, just decorate it in red, blue, and yellow, slap the face on there (signature curl included), and then put the symbol on his chest. If you want to make the cake Batman, you go classic gray, blue, and yellow, and put the Batman mask and symbol on instead. Need a Shazam cake instead? You’re on your own as far as replicating the suit, but Wilton gets you most of the way there. And you could probably get away with using the Superman face, too.
The 1980s
These superhero cakes must have been really popular, because just about every big property got a cake pan in the late-70s and throughout the 1980s. Here are just a few…
And that doesn’t even include updated designs for Mickey, the Sesame Street characters, and new Batman and Superman designs. Cake pans were all the rage!
The 1990s and Beyond
The trend continued into the 90s and 2000s, but it appears to have ended sometime in the 2010s. Here are a few from that era of pans…
I feel like pop culture cake toppers have taken over in this birthday cake space today. Admittedly, it’s a whole lot easier to get a plain, white frosted cake from Walmart, stick a Disney Princess topper on, and call it a day. I can’t say I blame modern consumers for going this route instead of taking the time to bake a cake, mix the food coloring into frosting, fill piping bags, and then put hundreds of tiny stars all over the cake, and hope you don’t screw it up.
My Birthday Cakes
I seem to recall having a Darth Vader cake when I was a kid, but unfortunately I have no photo evidence of its existence. I do have evidence of the Pink Panther cake that my Mom had made for my sixth birthday, though…
It’s kind of hard to see here, but the cake is this mold from 1977…
I wasn’t a particularly big fan of The Pink Panther (I liked the cartoons just fine, but that was the extent of my fandom), however, a woman at our church had heard that my birthday was coming up and she told Mom that she’d be happy to bake and decorate my cake for a small fee. This family was hurting financially – I believe the father had just gotten laid off from his job – so my Mom did the neighborly thing and paid to have the cake made. Apparently the woman who made the cake only had a handful of pans and The Pink Panther was the only one that remotely matched my personality, so we ran with it. I didn’t mind – I was six and was more concerned with having my friends over than what my cake looked like.
And while it wasn’t a Wilton cake pan, my Mom did make a Mickey Mouse cake for me the year before. For not having a mold and pattern to go by, I’d say she did a pretty good job!
As far as collectibles go, these Wilton cake pans are very affordable. Of course they range in price depending upon the popularity of the character, but most can be picked up for around $15 – $20 (including shipping) on eBay. If you get some of the later ones, they have holes at the top so you can hang them on the wall (see all the pans from the 90s slide show above), so they’re easy to display. I could see me picking up a few of these as time goes on. They’d like awesome as decor in our kitchen, along with our board games and other pop culture collectibles. Now I just have to convince my wife that we really need a He-Man cake pan on our wall…
