Walk into any supermarket with a bakery counter, and you can buy a Marvel cake for your eight-year-old's birthday. Spider-Man, the Avengers, PAW Patrol – licensed character products for children are so normalised in retail bakery that we have stopped noticing them. The licensing model is mature, the margins are understood and the consumer demand is consistent.

Now consider this: there is a generation of adult readers – overwhelmingly women in their twenties, thirties and forties – with fandoms every bit as devoted as any superhero franchise, with aesthetics every bit as visually coherent, with celebration occasions every bit as real. They are buying Velaris (a fandom favourite location across the romantasy genre) birthday cakes. They are ordering Fourth Wing’s ‘Basgiath War College’ cookies and commissioning Tairn and Andarna macarons in black and gold for baby showers.

These consumers are sourcing these online via Etsy. Not one major industrial bakery has yet moved to meet them.

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What the fandom looks like

Romantasy, the hybrid genre blending high fantasy with romance, is not a niche. Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series has sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing held bestseller list positions for nearly a full year after publication, and one of its most emotionally resonant details is a chocolate cake, the comfort food Xaden Riorson's mother baked for him and the tender memory he carries into war. These are not readers who finish a book and move on. They are fans in the full merchandising sense of the word.

The visual identities of these worlds are already fully formed. Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame are set at Basgiath War College, where riders bond with dragons and survival is the curriculum. The college's unofficial motto, Fly or Die, has become a rallying cry for the fandom, alongside, dragon silhouettes and the series' signature black-and-gold palette. The four quadrants of Basgiath (Riders, Scribes, Healers, Infantry) offer exactly the kind of self-selecting fan identity that the Hogwarts houses have monetised for two decades: which quadrant are you? Which colour is yours? Which product do you reach for?

A Court of Thorns and Roses gives bakers the Night Court – deep navy, silver stars, crescent moons, the glittering city of Velaris hidden beneath a magical darkness. Rhysand, its most beloved character, is an Illyrian with vast dark wings that have become the series' defining visual motif. His dragon equivalent in Fourth Wing is Tairn – enormous, black, the most powerful in the Vale, a stand-alone image with immediate visual impact.

Home bakers have understood all this instinctively, and the evidence is already there for anyone looking. Scroll any romantasy hashtag, and you will find individual bakers hand-icing biscuit sets in Basgiath black and gold, piping ‘Fly or Die’ in gothic script, decorating cupcakes with crescent moons and gold stars for the Night Court, and crafting dragon macarons in amber and crimson. The craft is high, the demand is visible and the aesthetic language is consistent enough to scale, yet none of it is available in a supermarket.

The licensing opportunity industrial bakers are missing

The children's licensed bakery model works because it combines a recognisable IP with a clear occasion: a birthday, a party, a celebration. The romantasy consumer has the same combination. A Fourth Wing-themed spread for a 21st birthday. An ACOTAR Night Court cake for a 40th. Andarna cookies – the small, rare golden dragon who becomes central to Fourth Wing – for a baby shower. These are not hypothetical purchases, they are purchases consumers are already making, from individual bakers who cannot meet demand at scale.

The comparison with Harry Potter merchandise is instructive. When Warner Bros and its licensed partners understood that the Hogwarts house system gave fans a personal identity to buy into, the product range expanded accordingly: house-coloured everything, personalised by affiliation. The four quadrants of Basgiath offer the same architecture. Riders Quadrant in black and gold. Scribes in something cooler, more cerebral. Healers and Infantry with their own visual grammar. A consumer who identifies with a quadrant will buy that product over a generic one every time, for the same reason a Gryffindor buys red and gold.

The barrier is not demand. It is that no one has yet secured the licensing agreements to meet it at industrial scale.

Why this matters now

Romantasy's core readership is a commercially underserved demographic in bakery terms. Women aged 25 to 45 are significant purchasers of celebration bakery, birthdays, baby showers, hen parties and milestone occasions, but the licensed product options available to them in retail are almost entirely oriented toward children. The adult occasion market is served by generic premium (gold leaf, marble fondant, botanical), but not by IP. There is no adult equivalent of the character cake.

Romantasy provides one with an existing fandom ready to receive it. A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing are the two most obvious entry points, but the genre is expanding fast. New series launch regularly; new visual identities form; new fandoms coalesce. The window to establish industrial bakery as the category that serves this consumer, rather than leaving her to Etsy, is open now, and will not stay open indefinitely.

The small bakers already know this. The question is whether anyone operating at scale is paying attention.

Sources: Puratos Taste Tomorrow, 'The rise of fantasy-flavored foods' (puratos.us/en/blog/taste-tomorrow/The-rise-of-fantasy-flavored-foods); Puratos Taste Tomorrow, 'The hottest bakery trends for 2026' (tastetomorrow.com/inspiration/hottest-bakery-trends); Innova Market Insights Top Trends 2025 Bakery; publishing data via Ergodebooks and She Writes. Fourth Wing and Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled Publishing, 2023/2024); A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, 2015–2021).