The 40-year-old cake is just for looks — don’t eat it.
Dominic Winter Auctioneers
Remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine eats a slice of $29,000 cake from the 1937 wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — then her digestive system wishes she hadn’t? Take a lesson from that if you bid on this slice of cake from Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s 1981 wedding. It’ll go up for auction on Aug. 11, from Dominic Winter Auctioneers.
The slice of history was owned by Moyra Smith, an employee of Charles’ grandmother, Elizabeth the Queen Mother. She apparently kept the ornate slice in a floral cake tin, with a homemade label reading, “Handle with Care – Prince Charles & Princess Diane’s (sic) Wedding Cake.”
It’s fancier than most wedding cakes, featuring “a sugared onlay of the Royal Coat-of-Arms colored in gold, red, blue, and silver, a small silver horseshoe and leaf spray adjacent, (with) some white decorative icing tracery laid on top at head and foot.” Still, the cake might not have been THE royal wedding cake.
“Besides the main official five-tier wedding cake, some 22 other wedding cakes were supplied by various manufacturers, and this seems likely to have been one sent to Clarence House for the consumption of the Queen Mother’s staff,” a statement from the auction house says. “In view of its size, it is most likely that (this slice) was either from the side of a cake, or from the top of a single-tier cake.”
The auction house estimates the slice will sell for £200-300 ($279-$419, AU$377-$566), which seems low considering how popular Diana remains. But while the slice comes with printed wedding and wedding-breakfast programs, it doesn’t come with the original royal letter and bottle of commemorative beer (!) that came with it way back when.
“It appears to be in exactly the same good condition as when originally sold, but we advise against eating it,” the auction house says.