Celebrating Pac-Man's 30th Birthday

Celebrating Pac-Man's 30th Birthday - here's a rundown of some of the coolest cakes (and cookies, and cupcakes) that people have baked over the years to celebrate others' special days.

1. Classic Pac-Man

Like the game, this cake is comfortingly straightforward.

2. Nontraditional

This wildly elaborate version was cooked up for Omar Kooheji, a sofware developer who wrote about the creation on his blog OHMZ. Judging from the vast amount of chips and soda, this was a gamer's dream birthday.

3. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man

Behind every yellow orb thing there's a strong yellow orb thing lady, and the members of SC3 (Southern California Classic Collectors) didn't forget that when they whipped up these pair of Pac-Man and Ms.Pac-Man cakes for their October 2006 meeting.

4. Solo Ms. Pac-Man

A bakery called SophistiCakes in Raleigh, N.C.. took it one step farther and created a giant homage to Pac-Man's better half.

5.The Game Cabinet

This brave baker went the nontraditional route, building up instead of out, which always presents the hazard of a cake collapse. On her blog, Glitter Pissing, the baker, Rakka, shared her feelings about the results: "I''m not too happy with either of those. Oh, well. Too late to do anything about it now." We think she's being too hard on herself. There is a tiny coin slot in the front, for Namco's sake!

6. The Impromptu Pac-Man Cake

How many times have you cut a slice out of something and said, "That looks like Pac-Man?" At least three or four times, right?

7. The '80s Homage

The only thing that could make this cake, created by Rachel Martin of Customized Cakes, more '80s would be if John Cusack burst out of it.


8. Cookies

You, too, can bake these adorable Pac-Man and ghost cookies using the tutorial posted by Jocelyn at Snack or Die. It's quite possibly the most ingenious use of a tulip cookie cutter we've ever seen (assuming that one has ever had cause to use a tulip cookie cutter ingeniously before).

9. Cupcakes

With round little yellow dude, rotund ghosts, cherries, and circular food pellets, Pac-Man is basically begging to be reinterpreted in cupcake form. These professionally executed versions come from Montreal's Clever Cupcakes.

10. Just the Ghost, and Nothing But the Ghost, Ma'am.

The total lack of background story supplied with early video games somehow made the conflicts more eerie. Who were the ghosts and where did they come from? And what did they have against Pac-Man? At any rate, we love the spookiness that emanates from this cake's glowing tea candle eyes.

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