Cake by Alysa Levene

Author:Alysa Levene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2016-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

A search for birthday cakes on the online pinboard site Pinterest brings up so many results that the site generates an automatic list of subcategories. These range from the straightforward common searches you might expect (men, women, kids, easy, chocolate, twenty-first); through to the imaginative (car, awesome, DIY, vintage); the on-trend (Minions, Frozen, Lego); and on to the mind-bogglingly specialist: a cake for your dog, anyone? I clicked on it just to make sure and can verify that it does consist mainly of cakes for your canine, with a smattering of dog-shaped human offerings and the odd rogue cake for a cat. The fact is that almost every occasion and every interest has a cake to serve it now. Whatever you do, whatever you achieve, and whoever you are, there is a cake that will try to make you feel good about yourself. In the next chapter we will examine cakes which are good for looking at as well as eating. But for now, we will confine ourselves to the occasions when a cake is all about you: birthdays, commemorations, guilty snack-time pleasures. We have already met a lot of special commemorative cakes on our journey, starting with the mythical cakes which are forever associated with King Alfred, through Queen Victoria’s sandwich, the Lady Baltimore and the condensed milk tres leches cakes that are baked across Latin America to mark a girl’s coming of age, or quinceañera. Now we will draw them together into an honour roll of cakes that are all about one special person. Let us start with that Pinterest inspiration: the birthday cake.

Birthday cakes are really only partly about the birthday person. They are also about the cake provider. For every child (or grown-up) who gets the special candlelit treatment, there is someone who made or bought that cake as an expression of love – and, let’s be frank, sometimes also an expression of that competitive edge that goes with so many aspects of motherhood. But the principal joy of the cake is marking someone out as special for a day. The cake itself, the burning candles (traditionally one for each year of the birthday person’s life), the formal procession to deliver the cake to the head of the table, and the chorus of ‘Happy birthday to you!’ all serve to heighten the sense of occasion and the rite of passage. Finally, the cake is cut and distributed to the guests in a form of junior largesse. The commonalities with the more formal and ‘adult’ wedding cake are striking.

Birthday cakes only really became popular in the eighteenth century as part of the same watershed expansion in ingredients and equipment that we have seen several times already. Occasion cakes could now be a special treat for the masses rather than just the elite. It’s also worth noting, however, that the recording of ages wasn’t always very accurate prior to this, and many people outside the higher social echelons did not know either exactly how old they were or the precise date of their birth.

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