The World's Oldest Preserved Wedding Cake Radiates Victorian-Era Opulence

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In Charles Dickens' Victorian classic "Great Expectations," the wealthy spinster Miss Havisham wandered her squalid mansion in an ancient wedding gown, driven mad from being left at the altar years earlier. Memorably, her dining room table stayed untouched after that fateful day, with rotting remnants of a breakfast feast, as well as her wedding cake, remaining where they were placed so many years ago. 

Maybe if Miss Havisham hit up C.H. Philpott's bakery in Basingstoke, England, she could have prepared for a late-in-life rebound marriage. One of Philpott's wedding cakes, baked in the Victorian era, was preserved and still stands to this day. 

Originally baked in 1898, this vintage cake was made to be displayed in the front window of C.H. Philpott, Baker and Confectioner, which is exactly where it stood for almost seventy years before the bakery closed. The ornate, four-tiered design marks it as a wedding cake, as does the fact that it's a fruitcake — long the traditional choice for a wedding dessert in high society. Fitting fruitcake's hardy reputation, the cake has survived for over a century, only suffering minor damage from German bombers in World War II.

Today, you'll find the world's oldest wedding cake at the Willis Museum in Basingstoke, which is devoted to all sorts of local history. Other exhibits include a mammoth tusk unearthed in North Warnborough as well as a stone coffin from the days when the Roman Empire colonized the British Isles.

The cake you see isn't how it looked fresh out of the oven, though — the icing used to be white rather than the dead-leaf brown of its current state. But on the whole, it's holding up pretty darn well for a cake that's older than King Charles III's grandmother.

As a matter of fact, if you were to probe the inside of the cake, you would find fruitcake that's still moist. Now, you can only store cake in the fridge for about a week, so this one isn't safe to eat by any stretch of the imagination. Not even the guy who samples MREs from World War I on YouTube would be able to handle this cake, but it's certainly a testament to the preservation skills of the team keeping it standing. It's kept dry with silica gel in order to prevent spoilage and injected with a gluey substance to help its structural integrity, but by gum, it's still standing.