Cake is not just dessert. Cake is a nostalgic treat of joy. Cake celebrates childhood, family, and fertility. An anniversary, a birth, a marriage (and sometimes divorce), they’re all special occasions that we celebrate with cake. My early attempts at baking cake were abysmal and Duncan Hines strawberry frosting rescued an under-baked cake, sagging under the weight of its rawness, on more occasions than I’m willing to admit. Still, I loved baking cakes because I created a joyful experience, limited only by my imagination, and it’s still the reason why I bake today.
Cakes played a significant role in ancient beliefs and rituals where they were made as offerings to gods and spirits so it’s no wonder that they continue to play a central role in modern festivals and social celebrations. But how many cake traditions fall by the wayside when we resort to making cakes with boxed mixes? In this age of convenience cookery, cake mixes are de rigueur amongst home and professional bakers alike. However, I don’t care what The Cake Doctor says, but a cake made from scratch tastes better than one made from a boxed mix. But the great appeal of cake mixes is: they always work. Boxed mix cakes are light, fluffy, and moist. But they also taste the same—an overtly sweet, synthetic taste that never satisfies. I could eat slice after slice of a boxed mix cake and feel as though I ate nothing.
“Romance is the icing. But love is the cake” –Julia Child
Cakelove.
The joy of cake. Tender and sweet, delicate yet rich. I prefer an unabashedly naked cake to one cloaked in an artifice of frosted cement in which every bite reveals layer upon layer of cloying, sweet disappointment. A plain pound cake, made with butter, sugar, eggs and flour, is pure perfection. The cake melts, giving way to the seductive allure of butter and the earthy perfume of vanilla. Crumbs on the plate, the shrapnel of a dietary resolve ripped to shreds.
What is cake?
Cake occupies a strange position within our social hierarchy and culinary realm, being at once a crucial, historic, and unnecessary food. Cake is mostly sugar, fat, and a boatload of refined carbohydrates that we certainly do not need to eat to live. Even so, cake recipes reflect the migratory trends of the frontier cowboys who moved westward without eggs for their cakes as well as the ingenuity of home cooks during the economic depressions and wartime rations that made eggs, sugar, butter and flour scarce or exorbitantly expensive. And while fruitcake remains the butt of every Christmas joke—indeed, to call someone a fruitcake is to question one’s sanity—one cannot have a birthday party or wedding celebration without a cake. The bigger and more outlandish the cake, the greater one’s social standing—or more specifically, the richer one is. But when cake has been dyed, sawed, glued to Styrofoam and hung upside down from the ceiling where it spins wildly, it becomes edible sculpture. Sculpture, but not cake. {Yes, Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes, I’m looking at you.} Really. Look closely at peoples’ faces when they eat one of these elaborately sculpted confections. I don’t see anyone eagerly awaiting seconds.
Cakewalk Through Time.
Like most foods, cake doesn’t have a definitive beginning and has changed much with time. The word ‘cake’ itself goes a long way back, derived from the 13th century Norse word kaka. Before the advent of chemical leavening, cakes were barely richer than sweet bread and leavened with yeast or eggs. Egg-raised cakes were the predecessors to whipped sponge and creamed pound cakes. Yeast cakes were made by working a little extra butter and sugar into a piece of soured bread dough, a precursor to our modern brioche. In 1420, cake came to mean “loaf of bread” and in the mid 1600s, the term evolved to refer to a sugary biscuit. It’s hard to tell how and when cakes morphed into the multilayered confections we know today although we can look to Europe where some regions continue to make cakes in the traditional way. The batter is fried in a pan, the layers are covered and stacked with jam or custard and iced to hide the layered structure within, and the finished confection is iced with a glaze of egg whites and sugar.
Although recipes for pound cake existed before 1800, they were published only as a list of ingredients with the assumption that cooks already knew how to mix and bake the cake. An 1844 edition of Good Housekeeping gave us our first look at a recipe proper: “Take one pound of dried and sifted flour, the same of loaf sugar and butter, the well-beaten yolks of twelve, and the whites of six eggs. Then with the hand beat the butter to a cream, add the sugar by degrees, then the eggs and flour; beat it well together for an hour.” Oh, that hour of beating. Cakes were hard work.
Flour, fresh from the harvest, had to be dried by the fire. Many families raised their own chickens and cows that produced their milk and eggs. Although baking powder and baking soda were invented in the mid 1800s, few could take advantage of the convenience as chemical leaveners were scarce in a baking era dominated by Dutch ovens and hearth fires. By the late 1800s, baking recipes were codified and commonplace, as was a cast iron oven in every household. Although these ovens lacked a thermostat, one could regulate heat by adjusting the amount of fuel—be it coal, gas, or oil. Baking powder became commercially available and readily accepted by housewives who initially scorned the chemical leavening revolution as a poisonous indoctrination. With the advent of electric mixers, eggs and butter at the ready, and chemical leavening, making cakes became a much simpler affair.
The Trials of Finding a Decent Slice of Cake
Though advances in ovens, mixers, and ingredient technology have made cake-making relatively easy, finding a decent slice is troublesome. Commercial bakeries use cake mixes and emulsified shortenings that allow bakers to push the ratio of sugar and milk to unnatural heights. (I say unnatural because traditional cake formulas will not work if the weight of sugar exceeds the weight of flour.) While cakes made with emulsified shortening are very moist, they are also very bland and quite sweet. It’s difficult to understand why bakers, who make their fortune in cakes, resort to schmearing icing from a tub and squeezing fillings from a tube. But when looks count and volume pays the bills, any shortcut that gets you to the finish line faster is one that many bakers are willing to take. As the quality of cake depends on many factors–the ingredients, the mixing technique, the accuracy of the oven’s thermostat and the baking time–it’s hard to blame professional bakers, who already survive on slim profit margins—for resorting to cake mixes. No matter who mixes the cake or how they bake it, a boxed mix cake will always be the same even if that flavor is reliably unremarkable. My body may be sated, but my soul will always pine for something more: cakelove.
Buttery. Salted. Caramel. 
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