R.Reader, I am here to tell you that dreams come true. You can really have anything your heart desires provided you are willing to aggressively and repeatedly abuse your position in order to get it. What I’m saying is this: my year-long campaign to Tom Cruise Sending me a cake was successful.
About a year ago I’ve written a short piece via Cruise’s habit of sending his closest friends $ 50 (£ 38) white chocolate and coconut bundts for Christmas. Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Jimmy Fallon, Graham Norton and many other high profile personalities all receive a cake that is lovingly made by Doan’s Bakery in California and shipped by Cruises staff. I finished my article hoping that one day I would be important enough to receive such a wonderful gift.
Then, in April, Cruise stated that, as a young actor, he once spent three days eating so much chocolate cake that he vomited. Naturally, I responded by stating in print that I deserved a cake from Cruise, and that I could eat cake better than he – which I would prove by eating his cake all at once on the toilet.
It’s a wrap … one of those wrapped cakes. Photo: Courtesy Stuart Heritage
Anyway, Cruise sent me a cake this week.
The box – apparently brought to the UK on his private jet – arrived wrapped in a cream and gold bow, next to a jeweled reindeer and a note that read: “To Stuart Heritage, best regards to you this Christmas season, Tom Cruise. “At first I was reluctant to open the box because the rational response to behavior as disgusting as mine would have been to put a spring-loaded custard cake in it, perhaps doused with anthrax. But then the smell hit me. Oh god, the wonderful smell.
The story goes that Cruise first came across the cake when Diane Keaton and Katie Holmes held a competition to find the best cake. Cruise tried Keaton’s offer and was instantly transformed. “This miraculous cake needs to be shared,” he thought, and spent several years shipping hundreds of them to famous people around the world. It is true that his marriage to Holmes, unfortunately, ended in divorce. But look, the main thing is that I have some cake from it.
I already had an idea of what the cake would be like because when I first wrote about it a curious reader ordered one from Doan and then wrote me a long email describing it. “It’s really delicious,” he wrote, adding that the sponge “is perfectly light and moist. Not too heavy, not too airy. “
Cruise Method Devouring Chocolate Cake, in The Outsiders, 1983.
The description was spot on. Given the type of cake and the distance it has traveled, I was expecting it to be a little dry. Not so. This is a soft, silky, luxurious thing so incredibly rich that it is almost beyond description. Is it the best cake i have ever eaten? Most likely. And look at me for God’s sake. I definitely know my way around a cake.
Wait, I’m forgetting something. In August, when Cruise hit the headlines for eating two identical curries in a row in Birmingham for reasons none of us can ever fully understand, I threw the gauntlet down again. I still wanted Cruise to send me a cake, I said. Indeed, “If you had the courage, you would send me two.”
And that’s why Cruise actually sent me two cakes this week. One after the other, delivered at the same time, like a baller.
This is a before shot. No after was provided. Photo: Courtesy Stuart Heritage
So thank you Tom Cruise. Verily, there is no limit to your generosity. Please believe me when I tell you that I will take these two incredible gifts and eat both of them sitting on the toilet until I vomit on my own. This is the only way I can repay your generosity. Merry Christmas!
