Old wedding cake fetches a hefty profit at auction

A slice of ​Grover Cleveland's wedding cake still survives, and it would likely demand a healthy price.

Photo Credit: The Grover Cleveland Birthplace​

By Alex Dalenberg

May 20, 2013​

​You've heard that you can't have your cake and eat it too, but here are some vintage collectibles where that is literally not a problem.

Because you would never want to eat this cake.

Yes, old cake is the latest collectible craze. So says The New York Times, which gets ragged a lot for selling these freakish anecdotes of the one percent as trend stories, but let the haters hate. If there is really f***ing old cake out there and at least one person is willing to pay for it, I'm trying to read about it. 

Read the wholeTimes ​piece here, but the gist is this: decorative cakes, packaged as party favors for celebrity weddings, are in demand. A piece of Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding fruit cake sold for $50,000, according to the Times.

I think the spirit of the article is summed up in this quote:

"Old cake somehow mesmerizes museumgoers. “It just sears itself into people’s consciousness,” said Sharon Farrell, the caretaker of the Grover Cleveland Birthplace in Caldwell, N.J. The museum owns desiccated fruitcake made for the president’s 1886 wedding to Frances Folsom."

​That makes a certain sense to me. We have a gut-level connection to edibles (pun intended) because we've all (hopefully) eaten a piece of cake. We really can't relate to 1880s fashion or being really excited about the invention of the incandescent light bulb, but, whoa, they ate cake too. 

Incidentally, we did a little digging on the Cleveland wedding cake. Museum legend has it that, sometime in the 1950s, a Cub Scout took a bite on a dare. This according to RoadSideAmerica.com.