All About Birthday Cake, featuring Cheryl Day and Bronwen Wyatt
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And yet the older I get, the more my birthday cakes look like something you would serve at a funeral.
From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know. I'm Jessica Batalana, staff editor at King Arthur Baking.
And I'm David Tamarkin, King Arthur's editorial director.
And today we're talking about a very important topic, birthday cake.
Never had one. Wouldn't that be sad?
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.
Like those big, those sheet cakes with white icing that's like almost like whipped cream. Very, very, very light, right? From the grocery store?
Very light.
Very sugary. Light but gritty. But I'm into it. I can't lie. I mean, I'll eat it. Yeah.
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.
Yeah. My mom also made all my birthday cakes growing up. She didn't slip quarters into them because we were very choking hazard aware in my house. We had signs all over like what to do if you see someone... But when we were planning this episode, a different memory popped up for me. And it was one that I didn't even realize was still rattling around in my old brain. And it's the memory of the cake that my first boyfriend made for me when I turned 23 years old. I was just a baby. And it was straight from the cover of Gourmet Magazine. It was a classic yellow cake, chocolate frosting. And I remember going into his apartment. He didn't mention the cake. I saw it on the counter. He just kind of let me find it. And just the feeling of, wow, you made that for me?
I was so touched. I mean, that is the power of a birthday cake. Now, listen, I've since found out that he makes that birthday cake for his current husband, which is... You weren't as special as you thought. Not great for my memories. Yeah, right. But whatever. I got it first.
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.
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Chapters
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