Cake Emoji — Copy, Paste and Meaning

The slice is called Shortcake

🍰 is Shortcake, U+1F370, added in Unicode 6.0. Almost nobody searches for “shortcake” — people want a cake slice, a piece of cake or a cake emoji, and this is the character they mean. Most platforms draw it as a wedge of sponge with cream and a strawberry on top, which is the Japanese shortcake it was named after.

The whole cake with candles is a different character and has its own page: birthday cake emoji. Keeping them apart matters, because the candles change the message.

The four “cakes” that are not cake

• 🍥 Fish Cake With Swirl Design, U+1F365 — narutomaki, a slice of cured fish surimi with a pink spiral, served in ramen. It is a fish product, not a dessert. Searched for as “fish cake emoji” and often mistaken for a lollipop or a sweet.
• 🥮 Moon Cake, U+1F96E — a mooncake, eaten at the Mid-Autumn Festival. Vendors differ over whether it is shown whole or cut to reveal the yolk.
• 🍡 Dango, U+1F361 — sanshoku dango, three rice dumplings on a skewer, usually drawn pink, white and green.
• 🥧 Pie, U+1F967 — a pie, and the closest thing this set has to a whole baked round. There is no fruit cake, carrot cake or funnel cake character; those are pasted as a pie or a slice with a word next to it.

Names, code points and versions

Why yours looks different on iPhone, Android and Samsung

Unicode fixes the name and the code point. The artwork belongs to the platform, and each one redraws its set every few years. On the slice, the things that move between vendors are the colour of the sponge, whether there is a cherry or a strawberry on top, and how much cream shows. 🧁 Cupcake (U+1F9C1) is younger — Unicode 11.0, 2018 — so it is the one most likely to arrive as an empty box on a device that stopped getting updates.

The Facebook and Snapchat “cake” is a separate thing again. When Snapchat shows a cake beside a friend’s name it is the app’s own birthday indicator, drawn by Snapchat, and it is not a character you can copy. Facebook does the same on a birthday. Neither one can be pasted into a message as text; if you want a cake in the message, copy 🍰 or 🧁 from the grid above.

What the cake usually means

In ordinary use it means dessert, a birthday, a celebration, or something being easy — “a piece of cake”. In some corners of the internet “cake” has been borrowed as slang for a backside, the same drift that happened to the peach. Context does the work; the character itself carries no meaning beyond its name.

Honest caveats

• There is no plain-text cake symbol. A cake in Unicode is an emoji or nothing, so a “cake symbol copy and paste” that promises a text-only version is selling you an image.
• All of these sit above U+FFFF and are commonly rejected in username fields.
• A screen reader announces “Shortcake” for the slice, which is confusing if your reader expected “cake”.

Neighbouring pages: cupcake, cookie, donut, ice cream and chocolate. The full set is on food emoji.