The sweet history of birthday cakes

You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties, and at a dear cousin’s birthday celebrations recently, I pondered to myself “why birthday cakes?” as a fork filled with Victoria sponge made its way from plate to mouth.

There are certainly other cakes associated to special occasions. There’s the simnel cake at Easter, topped with 11 balls of marzipan to represent the 11 loyal disciples. What a burn for Judas. Yikes. Then there’s the fruit bread tradition of stollen cake at Christmas, and there’s even a Lancashire Courting Cake baked by a lassie for her betrothed.

But no cake in the modern world, particularly the Western side of it, is as well known or as commonly consumed as the birthday cake. Where did this tradition come from?

Cakes and candles were thought to be a thing in ancient Greece. On a number of sources, including hankeringforhistory.com, I read about Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, foresty and hills, the moon and archery. Quite a lot of strings to her bow, you might say. Apparently, it was common to celebrate Artemis by offering cakes at alters dedicated to her. The cakes were lit with candles, thought to represent the glow of the moon.

The ancient Romans celebrated the birthdays of mere mortals, but exclusively the male proportion of society, who would be presented with round cakes made of fruit and flour, sweetened with honey. Early Christians rejected the Roman tradition of celebrating a person's birthday, believing it was a sin, an idea that prevails in some Orthodox Christian and Islamic communities today. But early Christians came around to the idea eventually, and birthdays with cakes seemed commonplace by the Medieval era. There's a reference to a birthday feast involving cake mentioned in The Squire's Tale, one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales written sometime between 1386 and 1389.

Skip ahead to the 1700s, when birthday cakes were very much a privilege of the elite. The ingredients were expensive, after all, particularly when the old-fashioned cake rounds of flour and fruit had been discarded in favour of multi-tiered extravaganzas.

A count celebrates In 1746, a birthday festival was held for Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf at Marieborn, near Budingen, in Germany. A guest called Andrew Frey wrote about the party in detail:“There was a cake as large as any oven could be found to bake it, and holes made in the cake according to the years of the person’s age, every one having a candle stuck into it, and one in the middle.”

In the 18th and 19th centuries, birthdays weren't commonly celebrated by less well-off folk. On newenglandrecipes.org, there is a quote from the Richmond, Virginia-based newspaper The Richmond Whig dating to 1865. "Mothers who have a dozen little ones to care for are apt to neglect birthdays; they come too often."

However, when the Industrial Revolution took hold, particularly in the UK and the US, the price of a ready-baked cake became more accessible thus reducing the pressure of cheaper home-baked cakes.

BBC's History Magazine website sought the expertise of Professor John Walter from the University of Essex and Dr Sara Pennell from the University of Roehamptom in putting together an article entitled "A Brief History of Baking". In it, Prof Walter highlights how convenience food grew in popularity in the 19th century. "We often think of the 'fast-food culture' as being a recent thing," he writes, "but women in Britain in the 19th century increasingly relied on convenience food such as pasties and pies."

Incidentally, the singing of the song Happy Birthday in accompaniment to our birthday cakes is relatively new. Two sisters named Patty and Mildred J Hill, who were kindergarten teachers in Kentucky, published a songbook called Song Stories for the Kindergarten in 1883. In it was a tune called Good-Morning To All, which may have been an adaptation of another popular tune at the time, and it was the tune that eventually became Happy Birthday To You. Warner Chappell Music relinquished its claim on the rights for the song Happy Birthday To You in 2015.

Today, birthday cakes are as popular as ever. Aspirational sites such as Pinterest have gotten many a parent into deep trouble in the kitchen as they try to recreate intricately designed cakes which require a background in architecture for their kids’ birthday parties.

In a frankly hilarious Buzzfeed listicle entitled “31 Horrendous Pinterest Fail Monstrosities”, at least 19 of the entries include some sort of sweet baked-goods catastrophe. If you’re not content with presenting a simple tray-bake or one-tier sponge cake for a loved one’s birthday cake, you might save time and tears by out-sourcing to a professional.