Jessica Batalana
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jessica Batalana’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know. I'm Jessica Batalana, staff editor at King Arthur Baking.
And today we're talking about a very important topic, birthday cake.
That would be so sad. I'd head over to your house immediately to make you one. I feel like the world is divided into two kinds of people, pie people and cake people. And I think, you know, which camp you fall in says a lot about you. I'm not gonna tell you what I think it says about you, but I think it says a lot about you. I am definitely a cake person.
I love cake for all occasions, but certainly for birthdays. Like a birthday to me is not a birthday unless you've got...
cake birthday pie is kind of sad yeah yeah cake is what makes the party a party i think and i was fortunate that when i was growing up my mother made scratch cakes for all of our birthdays you know she didn't do elaborate decorations anything like that but she made a solid scratch cake for each of her three children on their birthdays did anyone make her a cake who can recall i'm sorry mom
With the exception of going to other kids' birthday parties, all of the cakes that we ate as kids were scratch cakes. And then, you know, we'd go to other kids' parties and they would have store-bought cakes or box cakes.
Very light.
My mom's cakes, she would always wrap a quarter in a piece of tinfoil and then she would slide the quarter into the cake before she frosted it. And then the whole cake would get frosted, kind of like a fev in a king cake. And so then, you know, when you're cutting up the cake, if you were the person that got the wrapped up quarter in there, you would feel like extra special and super lucky.
I know. I know. Also maybe a choking hazard, but you know. I sort of just remember the excitement of like, oh, who's going to get it? You know, and I think that is the thing about birthday cakes, whether they're store-bought birthday cakes, box cakes, homemade cakes. They just inspire such nostalgia because we remember them as some of the first sweet things we had as kids.
Amazing. I mean, I have made a lot of birthday cakes for former partners and with various degrees of success. I feel like it's kind of a high stakes thing to do. And you're right. It's a total act of love to make a birthday cake for somebody else. And, you know, this birthday cake tradition is not new.
In 15th century Germany, if you had any extra money at all, you might have actually purchased a birthday cake. That's sort of where, you know, lore says that birthday cakes got their origins. They weren't like the cakes that we think of today. They were single layer cakes, likely quite dense, likely lightly sweetened because sugar was expensive. You know, there was no commercial leavener.
So you were at the whims of, you know, natural leavening or perhaps unleavened. And also, sadly, no frosting. These sound gross. It's a birthday cake, I think, in name alone. It's not really one that resembles what we have for birthdays today. I think that tradition really started during the Industrial Revolution because sugar became cheaper.
Industrial milling made white flour available to the masses. I'm sure the 15th century cakes were made with some stone ground, real nutty flours.
Exactly. And then commercial leavenings became introduced. Of course, let's not forget about the reliability of ovens, you know, that you weren't baking in a wood-fired oven anymore, which made it much more possible to have, you know, a cake that turned out well every time. And then by the time we get to the 1930s, box cake mixes were invented. And then after World War II, of course...
They started to be aggressively marketed as a convenience product to housewives. And people definitely took the bait on that because now they're a party staple. And you see everything from like the sprinkle laden funfetti cakes to themed sheet cakes, you know, from Fudgy the Whale to those beautiful buttercream dream cakes.
But like I said earlier, I just feel like it's not a birthday unless there's cake.
Yeah, I call foul.
We could all use a birthday moment in a regular day.
I think a sheet cake is such a great choice for a birthday cake. I think they are easier to make and frost. No, I know they're easier to make and frost. It's not that I think because, you know, you're not trying to stack layers. You have this like nice canvas sort of to work with. They feed a crowd. Sheet cakes were once the domain of grocery store cakes. bakeries, they weren't fancy, right?
Like people would have a wedding cake and in the back they have the sheet cake to cut up. Like it wasn't the showpiece cake, but that has totally changed. And now lots of bakeries make these really beautiful, lavishly decorated sheet cakes, you know, with squiggles, with fresh flowers, with fruit.
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