Cake is a perfect gift for anyone in your life for basically any occasion, as long as that person likes and can eat cake. (There are plenty of vegan and gluten-free options for mail order, too.) It’s particularly nice when those recipients live too far away from you to just pop by with a home-baked treat. Birthday? Send them a cake. Engagement? Go ahead and ship a cake. Death in the family? What better than sending along a cake to help them get through a terrible time. Cake says, “I think you’re special and you deserve a treat.” Cake says, “I’m thinking about you during this gnarly breakup.” Cake says, “Congratulations on your new baby, here’s something to eat out of the fridge in the middle of the night while you’re not sleeping.” And, yes, I also order myself cake — in my household, I’m the only one who eats it, so typically that means freezing most of it, slice by slice, so that I have cake treats for months.
The ability of cake to be frozen and unfrozen with relatively little diminishment in texture and flavor is in fact the whole reason you can ship it. Pastry chefs from around the country pack up their cakes and ship them with ice packs. It also means a whole cake can live in your freezer until you’re ready to address it or to bring it over to a pal. Or just, you know, in case of emergency. The emergency being that you need cake.
When it comes to which cake to order, I tend to go toward cakes that I couldn’t make myself or regional specialties that are difficult to find in other parts of the country. Hummingbird cake is thick on the ground in the South, but it’s a relative rarity in the Northeast or West. Doberge cake, that gorgeous New Orleanian confection with dozens of layers, is a particular favorite of mine to send because it’s both finicky to make and delicious to eat, and it’s a cake that not everyone has had a chance to to eat before. Let them. Let them eat cake.
This gorgeous, understated cake, like its name suggests, has dozens and dozens of paper-thin layers — maybe not a thousand (which is what “mille” means in French), but enough that counting them is a chore. They’re all sealed together with a light, barely sweetened pastry cream, which makes this cake a great choice for those folks who love cake but eschew icing.
Caramel cakes like what Caroline’s Cakes makes are the kind that I grew up on in Alabama. They’re seven layers of yellow cake held together with the richest, thickest, candy-adjacent caramel icing. It’s seriously sweet and best served in slivers. But it’s so good that you’ll keep going back for sliver after sliver. Caroline’s also ships out a gluten-free version.
In terms of classic cakes, you can’t go wrong with this Magnolia Bakery number. The yellow cake is shot through with multicolored sprinkles, giving it a festive look, and it’s all topped with classic sweet buttercream in pink and green.
If you’re sending cake to a minimalist — someone who prefers quality cake over swoops of frosting — the Milk Bar Birthday Cake is a great choice. It’s a naked cake, meaning that it has frosting in between the layers and on top, but the sides are left spare and unadorned, letting the vanilla cake really shine.
The great Barefoot Contessa knows that in a pinch, store-bought will do, which is probably why she offered this outrageously fudgy chocolate cake for order via Goldbelly. (Simply Recipes called this cake “100% worth the hype,” for the record.)
Yes, the company that sends mail-order pears and grapefruits also mails cake. I’ve been eying its version of a Hummingbird Cake, one infused with pecans, pineapple, and cinnamon and wrapped in cream-cheese frosting. Think about it like a carrot cake that’s even more extra.
If you’re sending a celebration cake, particularly to someone who doesn’t have ample fridge or freezer space, the colorful, candy-stuffed, miniature cakes from Flour Shop are a great choice. They come in 13 different colors, including silver and gold, and in two flavors, cookies and cream and rainbow vanilla.
Edgar’s Bakery is a mini-chain of Alabama bakeries that’s known for its excellent cakes, and now, thanks to Goldbelly, it ships all over the country. Its strawberry cake is at once fresh-tasting and luxuriously rich, and it’s also extremely pink, inside and out.
Doberge cakes are a New Orleans classic, with many layers of buttermilk cake held together with custard. The whole thing is then covered in two kinds of icing, first a buttercream and then a fondant.
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