International Pizza Cake Day Date in the current year: April 18, 2024

So what is a pizza cake? Is it a cake that looks like pizza or a pizza shaped like a cake? Well, it can be both, but International Pizza Cake Day celebrates the latter. Pizza cake is essentially a multilayered pizza baked in a cake pan or pot.

Pizza cake was invented by the Canadian restaurant chain Boston Pizza that has locations in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It was part of a campaign called Pizza Game Changers that featured various “outlandish” pizza-related products. The recipe for pizza cake were posted online in April 2014, advertised as “great for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and even lonely nights watching infomercials”. It quickly became the most popular product of the promotion and held the No. 1 position until the promotion closed.

Three days after pizza cake reached the top position with 15,000 votes, a pizza cake recipe was posted on So Good Blog, a food blog focused on how food companies market and advertise their products. However, the dish didn’t go viral until September, when a recipe for pizza cake was posted by one of the world’s largest cake manufacturers, the US-based Pilsbury Company. Because of this, the Pilsbury Company is sometimes mistakenly credited with originating the dish.

Pizza cake has received mixed reviews. Its taste has been praised (a Reddit user who tried the So Good Blog recipe described the dish as “heavenly”), but it has been criticized for being expensive and difficult to prepare, lacking crispiness in the crust, and being unhealthy (according to the Daily Mirror, a six-layer pizza cake created by Boston Pizza has 5,000 calories, which is definitely a lot.

Even though pizza cake has not become a staple at pizza restaurants, there are quite a lot of people who enjoy the dish and even cook it at home. Pizza cake is highly customizable and allows to experiment with various textures and flavors more than regular pizza. In addition, it can be a real showstopper at parties because, let’s be honest, hardly anyone expects to be served a cake that is also a pizza, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the dish.

Every year, pizza cake aficionados around the globe celebrate International Pizza Cake Day on the third Thursday of April. The holiday was established in 2017 and has been going strong ever since. There are many ways to celebrate it. If you live in North America, you can drop by your nearest Boston Pizza location (called Boston’s in the United States and Mexico). You can also make your own pizza cake from scratch and share it with your family, friends, co-workers or neighbors, or even host a pizza cake party or bake-off. And don’t forget to post pictures of your delicious pizza cake on social media with the hashtags #InternationalPizzaCakeDay and #PizzaCakeDay to spread the word about the holiday.