The Coronation Cake of 1937: The Year Délices Baked for a King

In 1937 a Greek-owned patisserie on Saad Zaghloul Street was asked to bake King Farouk's coronation cake, and in 1938 his royal wedding cake. What that meant then, and why the family still keeps the crest on the wall.

Every heritage café in the world claims a famous customer. Délices has a document, a gilded crest, and two dates: 1937 and 1938. This is the story behind them, told as plainly as the family tells it.

Alexandria in 1937

Farouk became king of Egypt in 1936, at sixteen, and his coronation ceremonies followed in 1937. Alexandria was then the country's summer capital, a city of Greek, Italian, French, Levantine and Egyptian families living on the same streets, and its patisseries were where those communities met. A fifteen-year-old shop run by the Greek confectioner Cleovoulos Moustakas was already known across the city for its éclairs, dragées and ice cream.

The commission

The palace commissioned Délices to bake the coronation cake. A year later, when the king married Queen Farida in 1938, the wedding cake came from the same kitchen. For a confectioner of that era there was no greater endorsement, and for decades afterwards the shop supplied Egypt's palaces, ministers and statesmen. The family never printed it on a sign. They did not need to; the city knew.

By royal appointment, long before anyone in Alexandria used the phrase.

What survives

Inside the flagship on Saad Zaghloul Street, a working museum holds the shop's first telephone, its cash registers, early menus in Arabic and French, and the royal crest. Visitors ask whether the story is real; the answer is yes, and it is documented in the Egyptian and Greek press. It is the reason the family speaks of a standard rather than a style: the same care that went into a king's cake goes into a Tuesday afternoon's mille-feuille.

Why it still matters

A royal cake is a nice anecdote. The point is continuity. The family that baked it is the family behind the counter today, and the recipes in the kitchen are the ones written down in the 1920s. That is what we mean by one family since 1922.