The History of Birthday Cake Making

A birthday cake is simply a dessert usually eaten together during a birthday party. Most birthday cakes are layered cakes with frosting usually served with miniature candles on top reflecting the celebrant's Birthday Cake. Homemade cakes are also available but commercially made cakes are easier to prepare and serve. Different types of birthday cakes can be bought in any bakery but if the birthday party is held at home, one can also make a personalized birthday cake.

Cake preparation times and ingredients have evolved vastly over the years. The basic recipe for any cake still consists of flour, baking powder (or baking soda) and butter or shortening. In the early to mid eighteen hundreds, sugar was also added to the mix to produce a darker, richer flavor. In the late eighteen hundreds to early nineteenth century, frosting was also added and cake makers began to add different flavor and flavored icings such as lemon, cherry and raspberry to their cakes.

It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that birthday cakes started to lose their more or less sweet flavor in favor of cream flavored fillings. This development is linked to the rise of the middle class in western cultures. In many cases, middle class families in industrialized nations are now able to afford more expensive foods such as chocolate and pasta. Because of this development in western cultures, the once "cheap" birthday cake tradition became a symbol of wealth and affluence for many people.

The classic dessert cake:

 It was originally created using simple sugar-based frosting and white or ivory birthday cake frosting. By adding complex flavorings such as fruit, nuts, vanilla, or even spices like cardamom and nutmeg, cake makers were able to create cakes that tasted better than the more traditional desserts with the same sugar base. These "artificially" flavoured birthday cakes became a staple offering at birthday parties across America, Europe, and Asia. As people learned how much more complicated flavoured icing could taste, they started to use more complex flavourings in their frostings including chocolate and peanut butter.

Chocolate and peanut butter:

 This have been in chocolate for years and they go great together as a topping on a birthday cake. Another interesting flavouring for cake makers to use is to add small pieces of fruit to the batter. These fruit flavoured toppings give the birthday cake an even richer and fuller taste, often bringing it closer to the traditional tastes of certain types of fruit such as banana, pineapple, and apple. In some cases, chocolate or peanut butter would be combined with lemon to create a "banana" flavour.

In some parts of the world, a variety of donuts (particularly donut holes) can be added to a birthday cake as an entree or even dessert after the cake is sliced. Traditionally, donuts are made with white icing, but today many bakeries use various flavors of donut mix to provide a richer flavoured icing. For example, some mixes have blueberry and apple which is a popular combination for Christmas celebrations, while strawberry and lemon flavours are quite popular for Easter and summertime celebrations.