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Open my wish list →People have been baking cakes for a very long time. Here are three true things about what cake is and where it came from.
The oldest cakes were really breads with sweet ingredients added. In ancient Rome, bread dough was sometimes made richer with butter, eggs and honey.
SourceThe word cake is of Viking origin. It comes from the Old Norse word kaka.
SourceCake is normally made with a batter, not a dough. The most common ingredients are flour, sugar, eggs, fat and something to help it rise, such as baking powder.
SourceBirthday candles
In Germany by the eighteenth century, people had begun to celebrate birthdays with a cake and candles. In 1746, a large birthday festival was held for Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf at Marienborn. A man named Andrew Frey wrote about the party in detail. He said there was a cake "as large as any Oven could be found to bake it". Holes were made in the cake, one for each year of the count's age, and every hole had a candle stuck into it. There was one more candle in the middle. Today, in English-speaking countries, the number of candles often matches the age of the birthday person, sometimes with one extra for luck.
SourceRising up
Sponge cakes are thought to be one of the first cakes made without yeast. According to the food historian Gil Marks, using a mix of egg and sugar to make batters rise was discovered in Moorish Spain around the eleventh century. The earliest known sponge cake recipe in English is in a book called The English Huswife, by the poet Gervase Markham, from 1615. It was made by mixing flour and sugar into eggs, then adding anise and coriander seeds. That early cake was more like a cracker: thin and crisp. Modern sponge cakes came about in the middle of the nineteenth century, when bakers began using beaten eggs to make them rise.
SourceThe Victoria sponge was named after Queen Victoria, who was known to enjoy the small cakes with her afternoon tea. Her version would have been filled with jam alone. Baking powder, invented in 1843 by Alfred Bird in Birmingham, let the cake rise higher than was possible before.
SourceSimnel cake is a fruitcake linked to Lent and Easter. It has layers of almond paste or marzipan, usually one in the middle and one on top. It is decorated with a set of eleven balls made of the same paste.
SourceBattenberg cake began in England. It is a light sponge cake made of coloured sections, held together with jam and covered in marzipan. Cut a slice and you will see a pink-and-yellow check pattern.
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