Miley Cyrus's Life as Told in Birthday Cakes
Photos: Getty Images
Miley Cyrus celebrates one more year of dancing dirty, filling Instagram with trippy posts, and singing addictive songs on Nov. 23. While it might feel like she’s been around forever, the calendar shows that she will be blowing out only 23 candles on her big day.
The singer-actress-designer broke through way back in 2006 when her cutesy Disney sitcom, Hannah Montana, became an instant hit. Fast-forward to today, and she’s best known for her NSFW performances and bizarre Instagram pics. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the transition happened, although revisiting the star’s birthday cakes over the years offers an idea.
Photo: WireImage
Teen Queen
More than a month before her Sweet 16, Miley had a birthday bash at Disneyland that up to 5,000 fans could attend for a $250 donation to the nonprofit Youth Service America. She spent the actual day giving a G-rated performance of her song “Fly on the Wall” at the 2008 American Music Awards.
Backstage, she was presented with a three-tiered cake to mark the occasion. The sweet treat was white with bright pink, pastel purple, and light green designs and rows of little music notes on the edges. Exactly the kind of thing she would hate today!
Photo: Getty Images
Rising Starlet
When she turned 18 in 2010, Miley was starting to sex things up. She wore a revealing leather ensemble as she hosted a star-studded shindig at Los Angeles nightclub Trousdale. Sweet and Saucy Shop created her chic, five-tier birthday cake. “She loves dream catchers and the bohemian style, so we focused the whole dessert table around that,” the bakeshop wrote on its website. “We did a tier birthday cake with hand-carved dream catchers, sugar feathers, and sugar turquoise beads.” It was much plainer than anything the songstress had requested in more recent years and didn’t feature any little girl colors or details.
Good thing, since a closer look at the bash — including photos of her making out with Nickelodeon star Avan Jogia on the bar — confirmed that Billy Ray’s daughter was quite grown up. Five days after that, a video surfaced of the teen smoking the hallucinogenic plant salvia out of a bong.
Photo: Coleman-Rayner
Marley Fan
The dessert at Miley’s 19th birthday party in 2011 suggested that she had a hankering for something other than cake. Kelly Osbourne, Miley’s co-star in the movie So Undercover, hosted a bash for her in L.A., where Miley was presented with a cake featuring a screen print of the late reggae singer Bob Marley.
Before anyone had a chance to wonder why she had a Marley cake, Miley explained. “You know you’re a stoner when your friends make you a Bob Marley cake,” she said in a leaked video from the event. “You know you smoke way too much f***ing weed!”
Osbourne later claimed the cake was a joke, and Miley’s rep said the starlet’s response was “intended to be sarcastic.”
Fair enough. However, there really wasn’t another way to interpret the next cake of Miley’s to make headlines. It was shaped like a giant penis, and she had it made for her then-boyfriend and future fiancé, Liam Hemsworth, in January 2012. The cake, which might have been better suited for a bachelorette party, was one thing. The photos that emerged of a 19-year-old actress, who had left the House of Mouse just a year before, licking it were quite another.
R.I.P. Hannah Montana.
Related: How Did Miley Cyrus Happen? The Road to the Twerk
Photo: Instagram
Rainbow Brite
As she blew out 21 candles in 2013, Miley had completely transformed her image, thanks mostly to her raunchy, twerk-filled performance with Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. Her cake that year was much less scandalous, featuring a rainbow-hued mix that represented the “Wrecking Ball” singer’s LGBT activism.
Miley was young, but she was already making a difference, publicly speaking about her support for gay marriage and showing off an equal-sign tattoo on her finger for the cause. In 2015 she would launch the Happy Hippie Foundation to support LGBT youth, as well as reveal that she considers herself gender fluid and sexually open.
Photo: Instagram
Pizza Lover
Last year’s birthday cake was equally fitting for the pop star. The sweet treat served at her private bash in L.A. — themed “Miley’s Twisted Mind” — looked like a pizza. Whoever picked out that cake had clearly been checking out Miley’s Instagram feed, where she regularly shares surreal images of a young Miley, swirls of color, and dogs, with slices of pizza Photoshopped into the scene. (Sometimes Elvis is there, too.)
Her boyfriend at the time, Patrick Schwarzenegger, was among the partygoers who got the chance to ride a mechanical bull penis.
Miley’s 2015 cake promises not to disappoint, especially judging by the wacky vegan cake she baked her dad for his last birthday and the one she was photographed eating from the hand of reported love interest, model Stella Maxwell, while posing topless for W magazine.
The confection will most definitely feature more than bows and flowers — just as the woman of the hour would want.
