Wilton Cake Decorating Yearbooks
All the Cake Pans Without Any of the Baking or Cabinet Space
I do not bake much. Actually, I hardly bake at all. But I love cakes, cookies, brownies, whatever I can get my hands on. As a kid, my family would make bakery items from box mixes or get something from the many great bakeries in our area. Cake was always served at birthdays, and they were delicious, but I always dreamed about getting a fancy decorated cake. This was before the modern fancy cake movement, where the height of coolness was a cake baked in a Star Wars or other pop culture themed cake pan and then covered in icing to complete the effect. Despite wanting on those, it never happened. That is probably why as an adult, I am so attracted to images of them.
Now, I could have gone for collecting cake pans. I certainly see them all the time while thrifting, but I know that I won’t ever bake one of them and if I tried, it would be very disappointing and the pans would just fill up my cabinets. Luckily I found a compromise. I started collecting Wilton Cake Decorating Yearbooks.
I like old cake decorating books or articles I find in magazine in general, but these are much more entertaining because they are dedicated to the cakes you make with Wilton equipment. They are filled with birthdays, weddings, school events, holiday parties, and ambitious home bakers trying to make something memorable. Some of the cakes are genuinely beautiful and so many of them are of characters I loved as a kid that even after looking at them dozens of time I can’t help but smile.
Wilton dates back to 1929 and was selling cake decorating tools through catalogs by the late 1950s. In 1964, the company published Cake and Food Decorating Ideas. Wilton says the title became the Yearbook in 1972, and the series continued for another four decades. The 2014 Wilton Yearbook of Cake Decorating was promoted as the fiftieth edition and turned out to be the last.
The yearbooks aren’t really cookbooks. They combined decorating instructions with patterns, supply lists, product numbers, and photographs of finished cakes. A cake that looked impossibly elaborate is broken down into something a home baker could at least imagine attempting. Naturally, there was a Wilton pan or decorating tip involved. Wilton was showing people what could be done with its products, then providing everything needed to recreate the results at home. Each page served as both inspiration and advertising, though it rarely felt like a hard sell. You were being invited to take on a project.
Here you can see some instruction on how to make cake and non-cake snacks for the big game.
Here are the results. Love the giant show and you can see the Pass the Pate mold (a tailgate favorite) and the adorable Take to the Field Cakes. Note that these are all just using the various egg cake molds that you would be using for Easter.
These yearbooks were also an opportunity fro Wilton to sell their Home Study Courses. $15.95 per lesson sent by mail in 1982 is over $50 today. Wilton still offers courses today both in person and you can find courses online. I have seen people post results and its impressive. I wonder if you could learn the same stuff from tutorials posted online?
The books also changed with the times. The colors and decorating styles shifted, as did the characters and occasions that appeared in them. Some of the older wedding cakes look like buildings. Many of the birthday cakes wandered over from the toy aisle, movies or television. The holiday sections are filled with cakes that would make any person’s holiday a little brighter.
Where have I found these? Pretty much everywhere. They are in thrift stores and used book stores that sell magazines. I never bought them when they first came out, but looking at the price tags that some of them still have, I think a lot of people bought them at Kmart.
I have built up a large collection of Wilton yearbooks, and I thought it would be fun to start sharing some of the pages that catch my attention. I am not planning a formal history of the company or a serious examination of cake decorating here. I just wanted to start sharing some photos from them starting with one of my favorite ones, which is from 1982. These will be photos and not scans since I don’t want to damage them anymore than they already are.
First let me start with a character cake. These were why I originally started picking up these Yearbooks and they never fail to please. Here we have Donald Duck and you get a good view of his pan and how the icing is applied to the cake to capture his image. Every year they have new cake pans joining their collection. Still my favorites.
Fake Food are popular. Here are three examples from 1982. They are not hyper-realistic, but I think most people in 1982 would have been happy to get one. I especially like the faux hoagie.
This Taco Tempter is pretty sophisticated for its time. No way I could make this happen even now.
They also have some odd cakes in here. When I first started this one, I thought it was a Barbie cake, but instead its a weird take on a bachelor party classic. At least a classic as I have seen on many sitcom episodes from the 70s and 80s.
Looking through these magazines is probably the closest I will ever come to owning all those character cake pans I see at thrift stores. I can enjoy the finished cakes without finding room for the pans or discovering how badly my own version would turn out. The yearbooks let me have the part I always wanted, which was seeing what the cake was supposed to look like.
I never did get one of those cakes as a kid, but now I have shelves filled with pictures of them. That seems like a pretty good compromise.