How to Order a Cake at Disneyland Paris
...It's not impossible, but sometimes it feels like it is!
On our
recent trip to Disneyland Paris, I decided to order two kinds of cakes so I could report on the experience in the Cake Chatter Thread: 1) The standard birthday cake you can get at most restaurants and hotels and 2) A fancy custom anniversary cake.
Standard Celebration Birthday Cake
The only kind of standard cake Disneyland Paris offers is a birthday cake; they don't have alternative chocolate messages like "Happy Anniversary" or "Happy Graduation." However, the French phrase for "Happy Birthday" is "Joyeux Anniversaire" so at least it looked to this English speaker like a wedding anniversary message!
You can have it delivered to a dining reservation for €29 and it must be ordered 2 days in advance. If you order it for your hotel room it costs slightly less—I'm not sure how much, though, because ours was bungled and we didn't have to pay for it.
Your two choices are a
vanilla and strawberry ice cream cake with a white chocolate screen print of some characters or a Mickey dome cake that looks and tastes pretty much like the cakes you get at Amorette's Patisserie in Disney Springs and the new celebration cakes at Walt Disney World, with one big exception: They only come in one flavor, and that's
chocolate cake with chocolate mousse and a layer of orange jam.
Now here's the other catch: If you have booked your stay at an on-site Disney hotel through a
travel agent, Disneyland Paris will not talk to you about your reservation
AT ALL, including to add a celebration cake. So all my requests had to go through a middle man, and none of them were met. I requested the vanilla cake because the travel agent incorrectly described it to me as not containing fruit (and didn't even mention that it was ice cream!). What I got was the chocolate cake, and that was only after I set a hotel concierge on the case because the cake never showed up in our room.
I dunno how helpful my photos are going to be, though, because there is speculation on TripAdvisor that Disneyland Paris may have changed the shape right after our trip. Supposedly now it's the same colors
but in a cube shape instead of a dome.
I kinda picked around the orange jam and it tasted pretty much identical to an Amorette's cake to me. So.... not my favorite! But if you like those and you like orange jam/marmalade, you'll like this cake.
Fancy Custom Anniversary Cake
This was another frustrating experience, but the results were better. After several weeks of being shuttled from department to department via email and phone, I learned that custom cake orders must be placed via the Disneyland Paris Special Activities department (DLP.DISNEY.SPECIAL.ACTIVITIES@disney.com) and that a reply can take up to two weeks (yet they don't want you to email them more than 3 months out).
They did send me my choices and some photos over email. But to pay for the order, I had to call again, which was another ordeal of dropped calls, botched transfers and promised returned calls that never materialized before I finally was able to do it. If your phone provider has a low-cost international calling package, add that first!
The Bad News: Fancy cakes may only be ordered from the Special Activities department, and they have a minimum order of €300! So even if all you are getting is a cake with no actual "activities," it's €300. Their first offer was €625 for ...
- a personalized cake with “Happy 10th Anniversary“ and names
- a bottle of Lanson Champagne, Disneyland Paris
- 2 Champagne glasses engraved with your initials
- a decoration made with hearth shaped rose petals on the bed
- a romantic balloon decoration around the bed
- a personal message in one of our cards
Which looks like this:
That was totally not happening...
So what do you get for your €300? You get to choose from a list of pre-designed 8-inch cakes. There is no way to customize a design. But at least they'll let you write something besides "Happy Birthday" as the message on the plate!
These are the choices:
The only flavor options are
Vanilla Praline was the most interesting-sounding to me, but I worried the Praline would be almond and have marzipan in it. Since I thought I was getting a vanilla celebration cake, I asked for chocolate for this fancy cake and picked the Snow White style.
Here's how it turned out...
I about died laughing when I saw that our 10th wedding anniversary inscription—which was supposed to say "You are my happily ever after"—was just a "Happy Anniversary" dedicated only to
me. I guess they know who all these cakes are REALLY for!
I was very excited to get a cake with dragees, which have been outlawed in California and I haven't seen in ages!
Although the frosting wasn't my beloved Walt Disney World old-school sugar-bomb buttercream, it wasn't that foofy, flavorless Amorette's mousse either. It was somewhere in between. The cake was moist and not as bland as Walt Disney World chocolate cake can be. And the fondant was the magical Disney kind that's soft and sugary, not hard and flavorless! (Yes, I eventually did take a big ol' bite outta that giant fondant apple, and it was pretty tasty!)
So I was definitely happier with the appearance and taste of the fancy cake vs. the standard birthday cake, but
YOWZA is that a lot of cash for something you can't even customize. I don't think I'd have done it if I didn't have you guys on the Cake Chatter Thread as my excuse!
