Tom Cruise gave this coconut cake to all his famous friends – we tried to recreate it at home

Eating a piece of cake isn’t just for birthdays, especially if you’re friends with Mighty Ducks: Maverick star Tom Cruise. Just ask Doan’s Bakery, a bakery in Woodland Hills, California, that has been making cakes, cookies, cheesecakes and more for 25 years and has visitors salivating.

While Doan’s is a favorite among locals and tourists alike, top tier celebrities like Tom Cruise are also big fans of theirs. In fact, Cruise is so big that he often uses the same cake from Doan’s Bakery as a gift for his famous friends. The cake is a decadent coconut white chocolate Bundt cake, iced with cream cheese frosting and covered with white coconut flakes. It is now known worldwide as the “Tom Cruise Cake” after superstars such as Angela Bassett and Jimmy Fallon publicly praised it.

The white chocolate coconut Bundt cake was so popular that a Yahoo editor waited two months for it to arrive via Goldbelly, a company that delivers food and meal kits from restaurants across the country. Her take: The cake is a “coconut dream come true” and “totally worth the hype.

But how much does this famous coconut delicacy cost? At Goldbelly, Doan’s Bakery costs $110 to create. It costs about $50 to get the cake directly from the bakery.

According to Eric Doan, who runs the bakery with his mom Karen, the white chocolate coconut cake has been known as Doan’s official bakery menu for guests since the bakery opened 25 years ago. “It’s almost embarrassing to say it’s probably been 25 years,” he told Yahoo Lifestyle. “And it’s become more and more popular.”

Doan says his small business has become very familiar with Cruz’s habit of ordering cakes over the years. “For the last 10 or 11 years, it was actually Tom’s production company, Odin Productions, that would order these and give them as gifts during the holidays or at the end of a movie shoot or something like that,” he shared, explaining that production companies typically order hundreds of the delicious cakes in October, so Doan’s Bakery has plenty of time to fulfill orders before shipping deadlines and the busy holiday season. According to a 2015 Facebook post by courier company 247 Delivers Inc. Cruz even seemed to thank his courier service for shipping the cake by …… that’s right …… giving them their own cake.

But what makes this cake so delicious? While Doan won’t share the list of ingredients that make the candy so delicious, he did let us in on a secret. “You know, it’s just made with a lot of love,” he says.

After learning about this sweet gift idea, I had to try making the cake myself, so I turned to copycat recipes on the online food blog Plain Chicken. Most of the recipes looked easy enough, and since I love to bake, I already had most of the ingredients at home. But what I didn’t have was the coconut extract and instant coconut cream pudding mix. Since the latter of the two is hard to find at my grocery store, and the recipe mentions vanilla pudding mix as a good substitute, I used vanilla instead.

Once I had all the ingredients ready, I turned on the oven and got to work, putting the butter, sugar and extract into my mixing bowl and whisking the ingredients together until it was pale yellow and super fluffy. When this happens, I grease my pan with the wrapper from the stick of butter – a trick I learned from chef Christina Tosi when I attended her baking club at the height of the pandemic.

Next up is the egg and pudding mixture: the recipe is clear; don’t follow the package directions for the pudding, because you only need the mixture. The cooking and baking tips website Chew the World says adding the pudding mixture to the cake adds more moisture to the final product and helps the cake stay fresher.

After mixing everything together, I mixed in the white chocolate by hand, making sure not to overmix my batter, then scooped it into a greased and floured pan and put it in the oven for the time indicated, which was one hour and 30 minutes. When the cake was done, I let it rest for about 15 minutes, then put it on a cooling rack and transferred it to a plate.

While the cake cooled, I made the cream cheese frosting: a fairly versatile cream cheese frosting recipe that consists of a mix of butter, cream cheese, vanilla extract and powdered sugar. After everything was mixed, I set the frosting aside to toast the coconut. This is where I noticed a huge difference between the cake Tom Cruise dreamed up and the cake I was creating.

In the photo of the original cake, the coconut was all white. While Goldbelly’s description does say that the cake is covered in toasted coconut, it is definitely not a golden toast color. However, since I followed the recipe exactly as copied, I did toast the coconut. I’m a rule follower.

Finally it was time to assemble the cake. I started by taking a large dollop of frosting and spreading it evenly over the entire surface. The best part? My icing job doesn’t need to be pretty because it will be covered with sweet toasted coconut flakes.

The end result of the cake was one that I am very proud of, although I don’t think it was exactly the same as the cake at Doan’s. I shared the cake with my family and everyone raved about how delicious it was. Due to the toasted coconut, the outside of the cake was slightly crunchy, in contrast to the silky smooth frosting. Both paired well with the slightly thicker buttercream.

What would I do differently next time? If I tried to make an exact replica of Doan’s Bakery’s version, I would definitely not roast the coconut as long, or at all. I would also make the cake in less time because I know the other bundt cakes I make only take an hour and 15 minutes. A shorter baking time makes a completely moist cake even moister and more delicious.

The final verdict? While I may not have gotten an original Doan’s Bakery White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake from Cruz himself, making this imitator was a good choice for me, even if I make a few tweaks next time.