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History of birthday cake

PRADEEP KHOSLA

FROSTED BEAUTY Writing on birthday cakes began with professional bakers and caterers

Cake history expert Simon R. Charlsey makes this observation: "Birthday cakes might still in the 19th century be of the same kind (as wedding cakes), but as their use spread, their composition became typically simpler. For preference of the child or the person celebrating, or of the cook, or whatever the confectioner had used for a decorated shop cake."

"Although fruitcakes and rich, yeasted cakes were the traditional English festive cakes, the modern form of birthday cake originated in American kitchens in the mid-19th century. In contrast to their European counterparts, American women were active home bakers, largely because of the abundance of oven fuel in the New World and the scarcity of professional bakers. By the late 1800s, home bakers were spurred further by several innovations. The cast-iron kitchen stove, complete with its own quickly heated oven, became standard equipment in urban middle-class homes.

Women in towns had more discretionary time, compared to farmwomen, and they had an expanding social life that required formal and informal hospitality. Sugar, butter, spice, and flour costs were dipping. Improved chemical leavening agents, baking powder among them, enabled simpler and faster baking and produced a cake of entirely different flavour and texture. A cake constructed in layers, filled and frosted, became the image of the standard birthday cake. One observer of the early 1900s compared bubbly soap lather to `the fluffiness of a birthday cake' and snowy, frost covered hills to iced birthday cakes... .

Writing on birthday cakes began with professional bakers and caterers, who were proliferating in growing cities. The cakes of the late 1800s were decorated with inscriptions like `Many Happy Returns of the Day' and the celebrant's name, a tradition that continues into the 21st century. Sometimes the cake was home-baked but then decorated by a specialist... . The phrase `Happy Birthday' did not appear on birthday cake messages until the popularisation of the now-ubiquitous song Happy Birthday to You (1910). Cookbook authors began to recommend decorating with birth dates and names and offered instruction on how to make coloured frostings. By 1958, A.H. Vogel had begun to manufacture preformed cake decorations. Inexpensive letters, numbers, and pictorial images, such as flowers or bow, with matching candleholders were standard supermarket offerings."

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