Art Cake

Originally Viking — from the Old Norse word “kaka” — the term cake has a long history. The ancient Greeks called cake πλακοῦς — or plakous, from the word for “flat”, πλακόεις or plakoeis — a mixture of eggs, milk, nuts, and honey. In ancient Rome, the basic bread dough was sometimes enriched with butter, eggs, and honey, which produced a sweet and cake-like baked good. Latin poet Ovid refers to his and his brother’s birthday party and cake in his first book of exile, Tristia.

Early cakes in England were also essentially bread: the most obvious differences between a “cake” and “bread” were the round, flat shape of the cakes, and the cooking method, which turned cakes over once while cooking, while bread was left upright throughout the baking process. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was a surplus of molasses and the need to provide easily made food to millions of economically depressed people in the United States. One company patented a cake-bread mix to deal with this economic situation, and thereby established the first line of cake in a box. In so doing, cake, as it is known today, became a mass-produced good rather than a home- or bakery-made specialty.

When sales dropped heavily in the 1950s, marketers discovered that baking cakes, once a task at which housewives could exercise skill and creativity, had become dispiriting. Since making the cake was so simple, housewives and other in-home cake makers could expend their creative energy on cake decorating inspired by, among other things, photographs in magazines of elaborately decorated cakes.

Later, as we all know, things got a little out of hand, and baking has also become a way to unleash their own inner world — phobia, pain or happiness — in a pure artistic way.

One of the last oddities is from the historic Mangini pastry shop in Genoa, Italy, and is meant to be a provocation “to play down a difficult moment, but also of paranoia.” They created the Corona Virus, little pastries in the shape of Covid 19, and consisting of a chocolate ganache with orange blossom cream and shortcrust pastry base.