A Tunis cake is a plain Madeira sponge under a thick slab of chocolate, finished with marzipan. It is the light alternative to a rich fruit Christmas cake, and for a generation of British households it was the one in the red McVitie’s box. If you are here to buy one: when we checked on 11 October 2026, Tesco was listing a Tunis cake at £10 and an M&S one was listed on Ocado, though marked available only from 17 December, a Cornish mail-order company is taking orders for delivery from 5 November, and the supermarket versions are usually gone by January. If you are here for the harder question — why on earth it is called a Tunis cake — the answer starts in 1907 and is more interesting than the story you have probably read.
Availability last checked 11 October 2026. We update the stocking record each autumn as the Christmas ranges land.
What we found that you may not have read elsewhere
- The name is older than every story told about it. A recipe headed “Tunis Cakes” was in print in 1907 — and it contained no chocolate, no marzipan and no fruit at all.
- It was an Easter cake before it was a Christmas one. The earliest dated recipe we can point to appeared in a list of Easter foods in March 1934.
- The popular Second World War origin story cannot be right. The widely repeated tale that the cake was invented by the wife of a McVitie’s baker stationed in Tunisia post-dates the name by decades. See why it cannot be the origin.
Where to buy a Tunis cake
Tunis cake is a seasonal line. It appears from around the start of November, sells through December, and vanishes again — which is precisely why it is so hard to pin down, and why so many people conclude, wrongly, that it has been discontinued. The practical advice has not changed in a decade: look from early November, and buy it when you see it. Waiting until the week before Christmas is how people end up making their own.
Where to buy one this season — checked October 2026
Mid-October is early in the season, so “not listed” below means “not yet in for Christmas”, not “gone for good”.
- Tesco — still listing a Say it with Cake Tunis Cake at £10, made for them by BBF Limited of Hull. It had shown as out of stock in August; when we checked on 11 October 2026 it was listed with no out-of-stock notice.
- Marks & Spencer — sold its own version in 2011 at £6.99, and readers reported buying one at M&S Lakeside that December. On 11 October 2026 an M&S Tunis Cake (530g, £10) was listed on Ocado, marked “available from 17th December”. We could not check M&S’s own website; if you ask in store, bear in mind that the Ocado date points to a December arrival.
- The Cornish Food Box Company — mail-orders a Tunis cake baked by Portreath Bakery (800g). It was out of stock at £28.99 in August; on 11 October 2026 it was showing in stock at £26.99, with delivery from 5 November to 23 December.
- Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Morrisons — all sold their own version in 2011, and Sainsbury’s again in 2014. Nothing was listed on the Sainsbury’s or Morrisons websites when we searched on 11 October 2026, and we could not search Waitrose’s; check from early November.
- Independent bakeries and farm shops — worth asking, because a bakery can make one to order when the supermarkets have sold out. Ask yours in October whether they are planning to.
- Gluten-free — The Cornish Food Box Company also lists a gluten-free Tunis cake, baked for it by a different bakery. It is the only one we have found.
The Tunis cake stocking record
Because availability is the whole problem, we keep a running record rather than a single snapshot. Everything below is either something we bought or photographed ourselves, or something documented at the time by a named source.
| Year | Where it was found | Price | How we know |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Morrisons and Waitrose all sold their own version | £6.25–£8.99 | Surveyed at the time by Ben D of Epicurean’s Answer, with prices for all five |
| 2014 | Sainsbury’s own-brand | Not recorded | Photographed by us in store, December 2014 |
| 2021 | Tesco own-brand bought; Waitrose searched, none found | Not recorded | Our own purchase and search, December 2021 |
| 2025 | Portreath Bakery, mail order via The Cornish Food Box Company; delivery from 5 November | Not recorded | Retailer’s published delivery dates |
| 2026 | Tesco (Say it with Cake): listed but out of stock in August, listed with no out-of-stock notice in October. Cornish Food Box (Portreath Bakery): out of stock in August, in stock in October, delivery from 5 November. M&S Tunis Cake (530g): listed on Ocado in October, marked “available from 17th December”. Nothing listed online at Sainsbury’s or Morrisons in October. | Tesco £10; Cornish Food Box £28.99 (Aug), £26.99 (Oct); M&S on Ocado £10 | Checked by us, 15 August and 11 October 2026 |
Two things stand out. First, a Tunis cake has been on sale somewhere in every year anyone has checked between 2011 and 2026 — three of those checks our own, two documented by others. That is not an unbroken run, but it is the opposite of discontinued. What changed was not availability so much as reliability, and to a shopper standing in front of an empty shelf those feel identical. Second, if you are not set on eating it on Christmas Day, the cheapest Tunis cake of the year is the one on the reduced shelf afterwards: a reader of Epicurean’s Answer picked one up from Tesco for £3.50 on 28 December 2011, and another found one at £3.99 in Sainsbury’s on New Year’s Day 2012.
What is a Tunis cake?
Three parts, and no more: a Madeira sponge, a thick chocolate topping, and marzipan on top. Commercial versions are often flavoured with almond or lemon. The chocolate is laid on generously — the Tesco cake we bought in 2021 carried roughly 5mm of it, a ratio that would be considered a mistake on any other cake and is the entire point of this one. The decoration is traditionally marzipan fruits, sometimes with piped icing in pink and yellow; Mary Berry’s version uses marzipan holly leaves and berries instead.
What it is not is a fruit cake. There is no dried fruit, no feeding with brandy, no maturing for six weeks — so if you want the traditional article as well, that is a separate cake entirely. The absence of fruit is exactly why the Tunis has survived: it is the cake for the household where somebody would rather not have marzipan and icing over a dense fruit base, and for the cook who has run out of November.
One point of confusion worth clearing up: despite the name, a Tunis cake is a British bakery product, not a Tunisian one. You will not find it in Tunisia, and it is unrelated to North African pastry. Where the name came from is a genuinely open question, dealt with below.
Ingredients and allergens vary by maker and change from season to season — read the pack, particularly if there are nut allergies in the house, given the marzipan.
How to make a Tunis cake
This is the reason a Tunis cake is worth knowing about even in a year when nobody stocks one. Unlike a fruit cake it needs no feeding and no maturing, so it can be made the day before and still be excellent. There are two components and one rule: the sponge must be completely cold before the chocolate goes on, or the topping will slide.
Ingredients
Makes one 20cm cake, 8 to 12 slices. Preparation 25 minutes; baking 45 to 55 minutes; allow 2 hours for cooling before the chocolate goes on.
These are the standard proportions for a Madeira sponge rather than a recipe of our own devising, which is exactly why they are dependable.
- 200g softened butter
- 200g caster sugar
- 4 eggs
- 200g self-raising flour
- 50g ground almonds
- Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
- 200g dark chocolate
- 100ml double cream
- Marzipan fruits, to decorate
Method
- Heat the oven to 160°C fan. Grease and line a 20cm round tin.
- Cream the butter and sugar until pale. Beat in the eggs one at a time, each with a spoonful of the flour to stop the mixture splitting.
- Fold in the remaining flour, the ground almonds and the lemon zest. Turn into the tin and level the top.
- Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out onto a rack and leave until completely cold. This matters: a warm sponge will shed the topping.
- Warm the cream, pour it over the chopped chocolate, leave it a minute, then stir until smooth.
- Pour the ganache over the cold sponge and spread it to the edges. Set the marzipan into the topping before it firms up, or it will not stick.
Ready-made marzipan fruits are a perfectly reasonable shortcut. If you would rather model your own, chill them for twenty minutes before setting them in place so the warm chocolate does not soften them out of shape.
Keeping it: a ganache made with fresh cream is perishable. Keep the cake covered in the fridge and eat it within two or three days, taking slices out half an hour before serving so the chocolate is not cold and dull. That is the trade-off for a topping that cuts cleanly — shop-bought cakes generally use a compound coating instead, which keeps far longer at room temperature. Tesco’s, for instance, is described on the pack as a “chocolate flavoured topping” rather than chocolate. With those, go by the date on the pack.
For a well-known alternative, Mary Berry’s Tunis cake is worth following. If you would like the rest of the Christmas table to match, our stollen and chocolate yule log recipes work on the same principle: rich, but nothing that needs starting in October.
The history of the Tunis cake
Most accounts of this cake begin in the 1930s. They begin too late, and they miss the most interesting part.
1907 — a penny bun with no chocolate at all
The earliest cake we can find under this name appears in Saleable Shop Goods for Counter-Tray and Window by Frederick T. Vine, published in 1907 by the Office of the Baker and Confectioner. Recipe No. 106, “Tunis Cakes”, is a plain bun of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, raised with baking powder and a little volatile — ammonium carbonate, the period’s other lifting agent — brushed with egg wash and sold at a penny each. No chocolate. No marzipan. No fruit. Whatever a Tunis cake was in 1907, it bore almost no relation to the thing in the red box.
1934 — and it was an Easter cake
On 28 March 1934 the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser printed a Tunis cake recipe — not among Christmas fare, but in a list of Easter festival foods. It calls for dates, figs, prunes and walnuts, bound with golden syrup and mixed spice. This version is a fruit cake, and dates and figs are the ingredients that matter for what follows.
1936 — the chocolate arrives
Garratt’s Bakers of Lichfield advertised a Tunis cake in the Lichfield Mercury of 18 September 1936, this time with honey, dates and walnuts, and now “iced on top with chocolate”. That is the earliest chocolate-topped Tunis cake we can attach a date to — and note that the fruit and the chocolate coexisted for a while before the fruit disappeared.
1930s to 1986 — Macfarlane Lang, United Biscuits and the red box
The Scottish bakery Macfarlane Lang is reported to have produced commercial Tunis cakes in the 1930s, and in 1948 it merged with McVitie & Price to form United Biscuits. It is usually said that the recipe passed to the new company at that point; we should be honest that this is an inference drawn by earlier writers rather than something either firm has documented. What is firmly dated is the version most people actually remember — thick chocolate, three marzipan shapes, red box — which ran as a Christmas speciality from 1973 until 1986. By then the North African fruits had gone from the recipe altogether, leaving a cake named after ingredients it no longer contained.
When Ben D of Epicurean’s Answer approached both companies in 2011, McVitie’s said it held no records of the cake and had no plans to revive it, on the grounds that it no longer makes round cakes at all. United Biscuits said it had no records either, because the Tunis cake “was a generic item” and not something the company invented. That is a telling admission: the firm most associated with the cake regarded it as something it had merely picked up along the way.
The McVitie’s brand itself is still very much alive — United Biscuits was bought by Yıldız Holding in 2014 and sits today within pladis. The cake has not come back with it.
Why is it called a Tunis cake?
Nobody has proved it. But the explanations are not equally well supported, and it is worth setting each against the dates.
The North African fruit trade — the best-supported explanation
The port of Tunis was known for exporting dates and figs, and dates and figs are exactly what the 1934 and 1936 recipes contain. A cake named for the source of its characteristic ingredients is ordinary Victorian and Edwardian food naming — the same logic that gives us Madeira cake, Genoa cake and Dundee cake. This is the explanation favoured by the food historian Glyn Hughes at Foods of England, who puts it no more strongly than “presumably”, and it fits the documentary record better than any other.
In fairness, it is not universally accepted. Ben D of Epicurean’s Answer, whose research underpins much of the rest of this page, concluded the opposite: he was “not convinced that the name Tunis has any significance to the origins of the cake or even the ingredients”, pointing out that Madeira cake is named after a wine it was served with rather than anything in it. The 1907 recipe, which has no fruit whatsoever, is a real problem for the fruit theory and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Austerity — plausible for the recipe, not for the name
Jo, of Sainsbury’s food development team, told Epicurean’s Answer in 2011 that the cake made sense as an austerity measure: “it was more about the significance of actually getting butter to use in the sponge. Dried fruits were in short supply so this was devised as an alternative to the traditional Christmas cake.” Ben D added his own observation that a compound chocolate topping uses much cheaper and more available fats than imported dried fruit.
That is a persuasive account of why a plain sponge under chocolate might replace a fruit cake, and Ben D placed it after the First World War. It explains the shape of the modern recipe. It does not explain the name, which was already in print in 1907.
The Second World War story — and why it cannot be the origin
The story you will meet most often online is that the cake was created by Elizabeth Ewing of Inverness, whose husband, a baker at McVitie’s, had eaten something similar while stationed in Tunisia during the Second World War. It is charming, and it is copied from site to site with the qualifications stripped out.
It cannot explain the name. A recipe headed “Tunis Cakes” was in print in 1907, and a Tunis cake with dates and figs was in a Somerset newspaper in March 1934 — both comfortably before the North African campaign. At most the story could describe how McVitie’s arrived at its own later recipe, which is exactly how Wikipedia words it: the updated recipe. That single word is routinely dropped in the retelling.
We would rather leave the question genuinely open than tidy it up. If you have a pre-1907 reference, or anything from Macfarlane Lang’s own records, we would be glad to hear from you and will update this page.
Tunis cake: your questions answered
Where can I buy a Tunis cake?
When we checked on 11 October 2026, Tesco was listing one at £10 and an M&S Tunis cake was listed on Ocado at £10, marked as available from 17 December. The Cornish Food Box Company mail-orders one baked by Portreath Bakery, with delivery from 5 November. Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Morrisons have all stocked Tunis cake in past seasons but list it only in the run-up to Christmas. Independent bakeries and farm shops are worth asking, since a bakery can make one to order after the supermarkets have sold out.
Why is it called a Tunis cake?
The likeliest explanation is that early versions were made with dates and figs, and the port of Tunis was known for exporting them — the same naming logic as Madeira or Dundee cake. The popular story that it was invented by the wife of a McVitie’s baker stationed in Tunisia during the Second World War cannot account for the name, because recipes called Tunis cake were in print in 1907 and 1934. Not everyone accepts the fruit explanation either, and the 1907 recipe contains no fruit at all.
When did McVitie’s stop making Tunis cake, and is it still made?
The McVitie’s Christmas Tunis cake ran from 1973 to 1986. The company said in 2011 that it keeps no records of the product and had no plans to bring it back, partly because it no longer produces round cakes. The cake itself is far from extinct, though: supermarket own-brands and independent bakeries have carried it intermittently ever since, and we bought them ourselves in 2014 and 2021.
Is Tunis cake a Christmas cake or an Easter cake?
Both, historically. The earliest dated recipe we can point to, from the Taunton Courier of 28 March 1934, lists it among Easter foods. It became a Christmas speciality later, largely through McVitie’s from 1973. The Cornish Food Box Company still lists an Easter Tunis cake alongside its Christmas one, although that is a modern chocolate-and-mini-egg version made by a different bakery, not a survival of the 1934 fruit recipe.
How long does a Tunis cake keep, and how many does it serve?
A 20cm cake cuts into 8 to 12 slices. A home-made one topped with a fresh cream ganache should be kept covered in the fridge and eaten within two or three days; take slices out half an hour before serving. Shop-bought versions generally use a compound coating rather than cream and keep considerably longer at room temperature — go by the date on the pack. Either way this is a sponge cake, not a fruit cake, and it will not sit in a tin until Twelfth Night.
Can I make a Tunis cake at home?
Yes, and it is far easier than a fruit cake — there is no feeding and no maturing, so it can be made the day before. Bake a 20cm Madeira sponge, cool it completely, pour over a ganache of 200g dark chocolate to 100ml double cream, and set the marzipan into the topping before it firms up. Full quantities and method are above.
Sources
- Frederick T. Vine, Saleable Shop Goods for Counter-Tray and Window (Office of the Baker and Confectioner, 1907), recipe No. 106 — digitised at the Internet Archive. We have worked from the transcription made by the food historian Glyn Hughes at Foods of England and from the digitised scan; we have not handled the physical book.
- Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 28 March 1934; Lichfield Mercury, 18 September 1936, p1 — both transcribed at Foods of England, which is also our source for the 1973–1986 McVitie’s dates and the North African fruit explanation.
- Ben D, “Tunis Cake pt II”, Epicurean’s Answer, 3 December 2011 (archived copy) — the 2011 supermarket survey and prices, the responses from McVitie’s, United Biscuits and Sainsbury’s, and the reader reports of reduced cakes after Christmas.
- Tunis cake, Wikipedia — for the Macfarlane Lang and Elizabeth Ewing accounts. Note that the Wikipedia article cites an earlier version of this page, so we have gone to its underlying sources rather than relying on it.
- Retailer listings checked directly on 15 August and 11 October 2026, as noted in the stocking record.
If you spot a Tunis cake this season — in a supermarket, a farm shop or a village bakery — do tell us where and when, and we will add it to the record.
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