Cakes

On every important moment in the cycle of life: on birthdays, weddings, and religious and traditional holidays, there are baked goods to share and mark the occasion. This can be bread or biscuits, but mostly and more commonly today it is a cake. Cake is so significant at royal weddings in Britain that pieces of the wedding fruit cake are wrapped carefully and packed into commemorative boxes to be sent to foreign relations, friends and members of the public. A boxed slice of Queen Victoria’s wedding cake, dating from 1840, recently fetched £1500 at auction, while a slice of Kate and William’s royal wedding cake was sold for a whopping £6000 in 2014.

We often assume that cake has always existed, but in reality, cake as we know it today is quite recent. The word ‘cake’ comes from Old-Norwegian kaka. From their inception, cakes were usually small, like biscuits or buns. Cakes were more bread-like than cake-like in the past and they were sweetened with small amounts of honey because sugar was not available.

Many biscuits, buns and pastries were and are called cakes. Eccles cakes and Tea cakes are certainly not cakes, but they do bear that name. Funnily enough, cake is also the word used in Dutch, although the word doesn’t occur in old Dutch or Flemish cookbooks.

Cakes and buns were used in religious and pagan ceremonies. Round cakes symbolised life and they were often pressed with a cross depicting the four seasons, later adopted by Christianity as a symbol for the crucifix. An example of this is the Hot cross bun.

Recipes of early cakes appear more frequently in English cookbooks from the 17th century when sugar imports increased. Sugar consumption in Britain even doubled between 1690 and 1740. The book The Compleat Housewife from 1727 contains 40 cake recipes that could have been already about 30 years old at the time of publication.

The cakes that were baked until the end of the 18th century were either small and not really cake as we know it today or they were very large. John Mollard’s Twelfth cake contained seven pounds of flour and had to be baked for many hours on end. These cakes were made in cake hoops made from paper, wood, metal or tin without an attached bottom. The hoops were often wrapped with moist newspaper to prevent the outside of the cake from baking faster than the inside. These large cakes were intended for special occasions because their ingredients, such as dried fruits and spices, were expensive and depended on imports. To be celebrated with something as precious as a cake was quite an honour.

Before baking powder came on the market in 1843, bakers used eggs – which sometimes had to be beaten for an hour – and yeast to get their cakes to rise. The texture was rather more bready than cake-like. The flour used in the past was also much coarser and denser due to old milling techniques that couldn’t create a flour as finely milled as we are used to today. Cakes were often first cooked and then baked, something that can still be seen in the stories about the Simnel cake.

When the use of baking powder for baking cakes became the norm in the second half of the 19th century and finer flour was imported from places like Austria and Hungary, cake recipes became more refined. But because the British have always respected their old traditions, we can still find the old-style cakes in today’s Christmas and Fruit cakes. These are much heavier and firmer than, for example, a Victoria sandwich cake. And many people still wrap their Christmas cake in a moist newspaper like their mothers and grandmothers did. It is still relevant because these cakes require a long baking time at a low temperature.

Some cakes get better if you let them mature. Fruit cakes such as Christmas cake, Simnel cake, Tea loaf and Bara brith only get better if they get some time or are fed with brandy or another liqueur. The same goes for gingerbreads such as the Parkin, which is quite dry at first and then becomes wonderfully moist.

In any case, a cake is something that you bake to share, either with your loved ones or colleagues, or with strangers if you bake your cakes to sell.