Looks pretty rugged, right?

Still as durable as the royal fruitcakes may be, these cake fragments have NOT been stabilized in any way. This item is intended for display only and should NOT be considered food.

It should also be noted that 40-year-old fruitcakes tend to be a bit candied in texture (i.e. sticky). So, if you open the specimen jar, they may remain adhered to the acrylic top. This is normal. Finally, some fragments will have more fruit than cake and some will have more cake than fruit, just like life.

Each hand-cut cake fragment is encased inside an acrylic specimen jar and presented in one of our classic, glass-topped riker display boxes. The riker display box measures 4 1/2" x 3 1/2". A small information card is also included, which serves as the certificate of authenticity.

"Only do what your heart tells you." ~ Princess Diana

On September 6th, 1997, a global audience of more than 2,500,000,000 people watched the funeral held at Westminster Abbey. Diana's brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, gave a very emotional speech, the heart of which might be summed up in this quote:

"Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard-bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic."

In the years since Diana's passing, there have been many books written about the relationship between the Prince and Lady Diana, as well as their own private lives as individuals. Given the myriad interests which swirl around the royal family, it is difficult to parse the truth from the opinion. However, what is clear is that Charles and Diana tried very hard to raise a family in the midst of singular pressures only they could truly understand. The heart of their story speaks to the struggles we each face as human beings as we move through our own lives.

As noted above, this specimen is a piece of the royal wedding cake, a traditional fruit cake with cream cheese frosting. The layers of the official cake took 14 weeks to prepare including an identical twin held in emergency reserve.

For display, each cake was sliced and placed into individual monogrammed gift boxes. These prepared slices were then placed into larger, hand-painted boxes and finished with sugar paste icing to form the decorated layers of the cake.

The tradition of preparing cake slices in this fashion goes back generations, as has the tradition of selling and collecting these literal slices of history. How far back you ask? The slice pictured below is over 176 years old!

Auctioned by Christie's in 2016, Queen Victoria's cake shows just how well a traditional fruitcake can hold up. Some 141 years fresher, our slice was also purchased at auction. As with other slices from past royal weddings, it included a monogrammed box.