Cake

A cake is a baked confection made by combining flour with a liquid, a fat or both, usually with a leavening agent. It can be sweet or savoury depending on the tradition, and its name and forms vary widely across languages, but in much of Europe and North America it has become the centre of celebration baking.

History

The remote ancestor of the cake is bread. The earliest preparations that could be called cakes were, in essence, breads to which sweet ingredients such as honey, nuts or eggs had been added. For much of history, the words for bread and for cake were used interchangeably. In ancient Greece, doughs were baked with flour, eggs, milk, nuts and honey, and in ancient Rome the basic bread dough was sometimes enriched with butter, eggs and honey, producing a sweet, cake-like piece. In early fourteenth-century England, cakes still looked much like bread: they were round and flat, and they were turned over during baking, whereas bread was baked upright. The great change came with batters aerated by beaten eggs. Sponge cakes, raised without yeast, appeared during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain, although that origin is not entirely settled.

In the Spanish-speaking world the name has its own history. In a Spanish cookbook of 1607, that of Domingo Hernández de Maceras, the word pastel was reserved for puff pastry with sweet or savoury filling, while bread-like dough with a savoury filling was called empanada. Over time, pastry shops came to use the word for almost any baked sweet, and the term spread to other preparations. By size, Spain distinguished between the pastelillo, the individual pastel and the pastelón for several people, names that still survive in some traditional pastry shops.

The sponge-based cake as we know it today is largely a product of the twentieth century. In the United States cakes became fashionable in the 1920s, when many women entered the workforce and had less time to prepare several dessert dishes. During the Great Depression, a surplus of molasses and the need to feed millions of people with few resources led one company to patent a cake-bread mix, which launched the first line of cake in a box. From then on the cake stopped being mainly a home or bakery specialty and became a mass-produced good. In the 1950s, when sales of these mixes fell, manufacturers found that baking had become dispiriting for housewives, and the psychologist Ernest Dichter proposed shifting their creativity to icing and decoration.

Culture

The cake occupies a very different place from one country to another. In Europe and North America it is part of everyday life and of celebrations. In Spain and much of Europe it is customary to have a sweet with the afternoon coffee or the Sunday coffee, and cakes accompany birthdays, weddings, first communions and Christmas. Traditional wedding cakes were rich fruit cakes, sometimes Madeira cakes, covered with marzipan and finished with royal icing or sugar paste. In England there is the Lancashire courting cake, a fruit-filled cake that a fiancée baked for her betrothed as proof of her skill in the kitchen. In China, mooncakes carry a special meaning linked to autumn festivals. In Asia, by contrast, the cake plays a secondary role, and rice cakes are the main tradition.

The word for cake changes meaning from one Spanish-speaking country to another. In Spain, tarta refers to the large sweet, while pastel is mostly used for small pastry pieces. Across most of Latin America torta is the large cake, and in some countries queque or another word derived from the English cake names the plain sponge. In Colombia people say ponqué, pastel or torta, and in Ecuador tortas are filled ice creams. In Venezuela the pastel is usually savoury, such as chucho or tuna pastels, while the torta is always sweet. In Argentina and Uruguay torta and tarta are told apart by whether the filling is covered by a layer of dough. These differences matter, because the same word can name something in one place that is entirely different in another. In Chile, for example, the pastel de choclo is a savoury dish of minced meat topped with a layer of young corn dough, and in Portugal the best-known pastel is the pastel de nata, which comes from Belém.

Today cakes are sold in bakeries, pastry shops and supermarkets, and they are decorated with icings, creams, fruit and sugar flowers. The icing is usually made with powdered sugar, some fat or cream, and flavourings such as vanilla or cocoa, and it is applied with a piping bag and different tips. Commercial bakeries often whip lard so that the icing becomes light and spreadable. For food safety reasons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States advise against eating raw cake batter, since uncooked flour can contain bacteria such as Salmonella or E. coli. Commercially sold cakes, moreover, are intermediate-moisture products prone to mould, which is why they are packaged with preservatives and oxygen absorbers.

Trivia