Brooke Shields is hoping to get back on Tom Cruise’s nice list for the next holiday season.
During her PEOPLE cover story interview, the actress revealed that she was at one time a recipient of Cruise’s coveted coconut Christmas cake.
“I was on the list for a while. I had a good 10-year run, and I got the coconut cake every year, which I was very happy [about],” says Shields who released her two-part Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields on April 3.
Cruise is known to send the $126 bundt cake made by Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, Calif. every year to his famous friends. At one point it was a gift from Cruise, his then-wife Katie Holmes, and their daughter, Suri, before Cruise and Holmes’s split in 2012, notes Shields.
“It was from them and Suri, so it was the three of them, and then soon it was no Suri and no Katie and just Tom,” Shields recalls. “Then it went from just Tom for a while, but not every holiday. And then the cake stopped.”
Cruise once criticized Shields in 2005 for taking antidepressants for postpartum depression after the birth of her first child, Rowan, now 19, and Shields responded by writing an op-ed in the New York Times. Despite the public disagreement, the two moved on.
“They invited us to their wedding,” she says of Cruise and Holmes’s 2006 Italian ceremony. “And I was like ‘Hell, yes, I going.’ It was extraordinary.” And they even hosted their kids’ first birthday party together. (Shield’s second daughter Grier, now 16, and Suri were born in the same hospital on the same day.)
Still, she’s not exactly sure “what happened” in recent years that got her off the cake list.
“I want to get back on that cake list. It’s the best cake,” Shields says with a laugh. “Tom, I need to be back on the cake list.”
Shields is one of many celebrities to speak highly of Cruise’s famous Christmas confection.
Top Gun: Maverick star Jay Ellis shared that he is a lucky recipient of the cake on an episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show.
“It’s literally like getting a trophy,” said Ellis. “We get the cake every year. It’s always a surprise when you get it because you’re so excited to get it — and you wanna make sure you’re still on the gift list.”
He continued to tell Hudson about how his family froze the cake to take on a Christmas vacation in Mexico.
Another Hollywood Tom — Tom Hanks — also shared his love for the cake during an episode of the YouTube channel Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meals. Hanks said that the bundt is “so great you can really only have it once a year.”
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Hanks joked that the cake is the talk of the town at his production company’s office. “They start eyeing what mail has come in? Is the big box coming in? Are we getting, what has essentially been called, the Tom Cruise cake?” Hanks said.
“Everybody starts slicing thinner and thinner slices,” he added. “It’s a mathematical proof that if you just keep cutting everything in half, you will never run out of Tom Cruise cake.”
During the 2022 holiday season, Rosie O’Donnell shared a picture of the white chocolate cake that’s covered in shredded coconut flakes. It showed the note that comes with the dessert box.
“Warmest wishes to you this holiday season. Tom Cruise,” it reads.
“My Tommy sent me a coconut cake!!” O’Donnell wrote on Instagram. “I love that guy.”