Wednesday, April 28, 2021 – Cakes
I walk by a home with this sign in the yard. Evidently, some wonderful baker is advertising her business. There is nothing that makes my mouth water more than the thought of a delicious cake. It makes all taste buds tingle and satisfies my sweet tooth. Can you tell that sugar is my weakness? I have made many cakes in my lifetime, some from scratch and some from a mix. If I make a layer cake, I have usually had trouble because the layers were too thin. Then I discovered the 8-inch (as opposed to 9-inch) cake pan. That made all the difference.
I recently made a chocolate malt nest cake for Easter. It is in the photo on the right. Those are malted milk Easter eggs in the middle. It was a complicated recipe from scratch that took a lot of time but turned out well. To make the cake look like a nest, I crushed shredded wheat cereal and mixed it with melted butter and sugar, browning it in the oven. Then I mixed it in melted chocolate and sprinkled it all over the cake. A lot of trouble but worth the effort.
One of my favorite cakes as a child looked like a woman with a full-skirted ball gown. The cake was the skirt and there was a doll stuck in the top with icing decorating her torso like the top half of the gown. I have enjoyed watching Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes and other cake competition shows on television. The creativity is amazing. Let’s learn more about cakes.
According to Wikipedia, cake is a form of sweet food made from flour, sugar and other ingredients, that is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elaborate, and that share features with other desserts such as pastries, meringues, custards and pies.
The most commonly used cake ingredients include flour, sugar, eggs, butter or oil or margarine, a liquid and a leavening agent, such as baking soda or baking powder. Common additional ingredients and flavorings include dried, candied or fresh fruit; nuts; cocoa; and extracts such as vanilla, with numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients. Cakes can also be filled with fruit preserves, nuts or dessert sauces like pastry cream, iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.
Cake is often served as a celebratory dish on ceremonial occasions, such as weddings, anniversaries and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some are rich and elaborate, and many are centuries old. Cake-making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into it — particularly the whisking of egg foams, baking equipment and directions have been simplified so that even the most amateur of cooks may bake a cake.
History
The term "cake" has a long history. The word itself is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse word "kaka."
The ancient Greeks called cake πλακοῦς or plakous, which was derived from the word for "flat," πλακόεις or plakoeis. It was baked using flour mixed with eggs, milk, nuts and honey. They also had a cake called "satura," which was a flat heavy cake. During the Roman period, the name for cake became "placenta" which was derived from the Greek term. A placenta was baked on a pastry base or inside a pastry case.
The Greeks invented beer as a leavener, frying fritters in olive oil and cheesecakes using goat’s milk. In ancient Rome, the basic bread dough was sometimes enriched with butter, eggs and honey, which produced a sweet and cake-like baked good. Roman 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.
Cake mixes
During the Great Depression, 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.
Later, during the post-war boom, other American companies — notably General Mills — developed this idea further, marketing cake mix on the principle of convenience, especially to housewives. 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. This was a period in American ideological history when women, retired from the wartime labor force, were confined to the domestic sphere, while still exposed to the blossoming consumerism in the U.S. This inspired psychologist Ernest Dichter to find a solution to the cake mix problem in the frosting. 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.
Ever since, cake in a box has become a staple of supermarkets and is complemented with frosting in a can.
Butter cake
A butter cake is a cake in which one of the main ingredients is butter. Butter cake is baked with basic ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs, flour and leavening agents such as baking powder or baking soda It is considered as one of the quintessential cakes in American baking. Butter cake originated from the English pound cake, which traditionally used equal amounts of butter, flour, sugar and eggs to bake a heavy, rich cake.
The invention of baking powder and other chemical leavening agents during the 19th century substantially increased the flexibility of this traditional pound cake by introducing the possibility of creating lighter, fluffier cakes using these traditional combinations of ingredients, and it is this transformation that brought about the modern butter cake.
Butter cakes are traditionally made using a creaming method, in which the butter and sugar are first beaten until fluffy to incorporate air into the butter. Eggs are then added gradually, creating an emulsion, followed by alternating portions of wet and dry ingredients. Butter cakes are typically rich and moist when stored at room temperature, but they tend to stiffen, dry out and lose flavor when refrigerated, making them unsuitable for filling or frosting in advance with ingredients that must be refrigerated, such as cream cheese frosting and pastry cream.
Another type of butter cake that takes its names from the proportion of ingredients used is 1-2-3-4 cake: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and 4 eggs. According to Beth Tartan, this cake was one of the most common among the American pioneers who settled North Carolina.
Sponge cake
Sponge cake is a light cake made with egg whites, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first of the non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in a book by the English poet Gervase Markham, “The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman” in 1615. Still, the cake was much more like a cracker: thin and crispy. Sponge cakes became the cake recognized today when bakers started using beaten eggs as a rising agent in the mid-18th century. The Victorian creation of baking powder by English food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843 allowed the addition of butter to the traditional sponge recipe, resulting in the creation of the Victoria sponge.
The earliest known recipe for sponge cake or biscuit bread from Gervase Markham's “The English Huswife” in 1615 is prepared by mixing flour and sugar into eggs, then seasoning with anise and coriander seeds. Ninteenth-century descriptions of avral vary from place to place, but it is sometimes described as "sponge biscuits" or a "crisp sponge" with a light dusting of sugar." Traditional American sponge recipes diverged from earlier methods of preparation, adding ingredients like vinegar, baking powder, hot water or milk. The basic recipe is also used for madeleines, ladyfingers and trifles, as well as some versions of strawberry shortcake.
Although sponge cake is usually made without butter, its flavor is often enhanced with buttercream, pastry cream or other types of fillings and frostings. Sponge soaks up flavors from fresh fruits, fillings and custard sauces. Sponge cake covered in boiled icing was very popular in American cuisine during the 1920s and 1930s. The delicate texture of sponge and angel food cakes, and the difficulty of their preparation, meant these cakes were more expensive than daily staple pies. At the historic Frances Virginia Tea Room in Atlanta, sponge cake with lemon filling and boiled icing was served, while New York City's Crumperie served not only crumpets but toasted sponge cake as well.
The basic whisked sponge cake does not contain any fat. It is made by whisking egg whites and caster sugar and gently folding in flour. The process of whisking egg whites incorporates air bubbles to create a foam by agitating the protein albumen to create a partially coagulated membrane, making the egg whites stiffer and increasing their volume. This type of cake — also called foam cake — depends on aeration of eggs and heat to rise. Some types of sponge are baked in ungreased pans to improve the cake's rise by allowing the batter to adhere and climb the sides of the pan. To maintain the moisture of the cake, it is sometimes made with potato flour.
Variations on the basic sponge sometimes add butter or egg yolks to make the cake more moist. For Genoise cake, flour and melted butter are added to the egg mixture for a moister cake. The "biscuit" sponge from early American cuisine is made by beating egg yolks with sugar, then alternately folding in whisked egg whites and flour. Anne Willan, founder of the École de Cuisine La Varenne, says both types of sponge cake are represented in French cuisine. According to Willan, "sponge may have some butter added, but not much or it will not rise." Cream of tartar or baking soda are recommended by some turn-of-the-century cookbooks to make Swiss rolls more pliable and easier to roll.
In the Phliippines, sponge cakes and chiffon cakes were introduced during the Spanish period. They are known collectively as mamón. They are typically baked as cupcakes, loaves or cake rolls. Traditionally, they are simply served with just butter or margarine and white sugar. Variants of mamón also use unique ingredients, the most common being purple yam and pandan leaves which result in the ube cake and the buko pandan cake. Crispy cookie-like versions are known as mamón tostado and broas.
Steamed sponge cake like ma lai gao are commonly found in Malaysia. Chinese almond sponge is steamed and topped with boiled icing, chocolate, vegetables or fresh fruit. Korean sponge called saeng is usually made with rice flour and topped with whipped topping and fruit. Some Vietnamese varieties may have fresh herbs like mint, lemon grass or basil added to the batter, and be topped with caramelized tropical fruit. Milk and jaggery — non-centrifugal cane sugar — are added to sponge cake in India which is served with the creamy Sri Lankan specialty "avocado crazy." Western style sponge cakes topped with whipped cream and strawberries are popular in Japan where sponge is also used as a base for cheesecakes.
Angel food cake or angel cake is a type of sponge cake made with egg whites, flour and sugar. A whipping agent, such as cream of tartar, is commonly added. It differs from other cakes because it uses no butter. Its aerated texture comes from whipped egg white. Angel food cake originated in the United States and first became popular in the late 19th century. It gained its unique reputation along with its name due to its light and fluffy texture.
Angel food cake requires egg whites whipped until they are stiff Cream of tartar is added to the mixture to stabilize the egg whites. Remaining ingredients are gently folded into the egg white mixture.
For this method of leavening to work well, it is useful to have flour that has been made of softer wheat. Cake flour is generally used because of its light texture. The softer wheat and the lack of fat cause angel food cake to have a very light texture and taste.
Angel food cake should be cut with a serrated blade, as a straight-edged blade tends to compress the cake rather than slice it. Forks, electric serrated knives, special tined cutters or a strong thread should be used instead.
Angel food cake should be cut with a serrated blade, as a straight-edged blade tends to compress the cake rather than slice it. Forks, electric serrated knives, special tined cutters or a strong thread should be used instead.
Angel food cake is usually baked in a tube pan, a tall, round pan with a tube up the center that leaves a hole in the middle of the cake. The center tube allows the cake batter to rise higher by “clinging” to all sides of the pan. The angel food cake pan should not be greased, unlike pans used to prepare other cakes. This allows the cake to have a surface upon which to crawl up, helping it to rise. After baking, the cake pan is inverted while cooling to prevent the cake from falling in on itself. Angel food cake is sometimes frosted but more often has some sort of sauce, such as a sweet fruit sauce, drizzled over it. A simple glaze is also popular. Recently, many chefs — Alton Brown in particular — have popularized the idea of adding aromatic spices such as mace and cloves to the cake.
Angel food cake is a white sponge cake made with only stiffly beaten egg whites —yolks would make it yellow and inhibit the stiffening of the whites — and no butter. The first recipe in a cookbook for a white sponge cake is in Lettice Bryan’s “The Kentucky Housewife” of 1839.
“The Home Messenger Book of Tested Recipes,” 2nd ed., 1878, by Isabella Stewart contained the first recipe for angel's food cake. Stewart's detailed recipe called for eleven egg whites, sugar, flour, vanilla extract and cream of tartar.
A chiffon cake is a very light cake made with vegetable oil, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and flavorings. Being made with vegetable oil instead of a traditional solid fat such as butter or shortening, it is easier to beat air into the batter. As a result, chiffon cakes achieve a fluffy texture by having egg whites beaten separately until stiff and then folded into the cake batter before baking. Its aeration properties rely on both the quality of the meringue and the chemical leaveners.
A chiffon cake combines methods used with sponge cakes and conventional cakes. It includes baking powder and vegetable oil, but the eggs are separated and the whites are beaten before being folded into the batter, creating the rich flavor like an oil cake, but with a lighter texture that is more like a sponge cake.
They can be baked in tube pans or layered with fillings and frostings.
In the original recipe, the cake tin is not lined or greased, which enables the cake batter to stick to side of the pan, giving the cake better leverage to rise, as well as support in the cooling process when the cake is turned upside down to keep air bubbles stable.
The high oil and egg content create a very moist cake, and as oil is liquid even at cooler temperatures, chiffon cakes do not tend to harden or dry out as traditional butter cakes might. This makes them better-suited than many cakes to filling or frosting with ingredients that need to be refrigerated or frozen, such as pastry cream or ice cream. The lack of butter, however, means that chiffon cakes lack much of the rich flavor of butter cakes.
The recipe is credited to Harry Baker (1883–1974), a California insurance salesman turned caterer. Baker kept the recipe secret for 20 years until he sold it to General Mills, which spread the recipe through marketing materials in the 1940s and 1950s under the name "chiffon cake," and a set of 14 recipes and variations was released to the public in a Betty Crocker pamphlet published in 1948.
Chiffon cake was commonly served with grapefruit at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood during the 1930s. In the United States, March 29 is National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day.
A Boston cream pie is a cake with a cream filling. The dessert acquired its name when cakes and pies were cooked in the same pans, and the words were used interchangeably. The opposite naming convention is still current in French, where anything baked in a rectangular loaf pan is called a cake. In the later part of the 19th century, this type of cake was variously called a "cream pie," a "chocolate cream pie" or a "custard cake."
Owners of the Parker House Hotel in Boston say that the Boston cream pie was first created at the hotel in 1881 by French chef Raelyn, who led the hotel's culinary staff from 1865 to 1881. A direct descendant of earlier cakes known as American pudding-cake pie and Washington pie, the dessert was referred to as chocolate cream pie, Parker House chocolate cream pie and finally Boston cream pie on Parker House's menus. The cake consisted of two layers of French butter sponge cake filled with thick custard and brushed with a rum syrup; its side was coated with the same custard overlaid with toasted sliced almonds, and the top coated with chocolate fondant. While other custard cakes may have existed at that time, baking chocolate as a coating was a new process, making it unique and a popular choice on the menu.
The name "chocolate cream pie" first appeared in the 1872 “Methodist Almanac.” An early printed use of the term "Boston cream pie" occurred in the “Granite Iron Ware Cook Book,” printed in 1878. The earliest known recipe for the modern variant was printed in “Miss Parloa’s Kitchen Companion” in 1887 as "chocolate cream pie."
Boston cream pie is the official dessert of Massachusetts, declared as such on December 12, 1996.
A Boston cream doughnut is a name for a Berliner filled with vanilla custard or crème pâtissière and topped with icing made from chocolate. This doughnut can be found at various restaurants including Dunkin’ Donuts.
A génoise — usually spelled genoise in English and also known as Genoese cake or Genovese cake — is an Italian sponge cake named after the city of Genoa and associated with Italian and French cuisine. Instead of using chemical leavening, air is suspended in the batter during mixing to provide volume.
Genoise should not be confused with pain de Gênes or "Genoa bread" which is made from almond paste, but it is similar to pan di Spagna or "Spanish bread," another Italian sponge cake.
It is a whole-egg cake, unlike some other sponge cakes for which yolks and whites are beaten separately. The eggs, and sometimes extra yolks, are beaten with sugar and heated at the same time, using a bain-marie or flame, to a stage known to patissiers as "ribbon stage." A genoise is generally a fairly lean cake, getting most of its fat from egg yolks, but some recipes also add in melted butter before baking.
Genoise is a basic building block of much French pâtisserie and is used for making several different types of cake. The batter usually is baked to form a thin sheet. An 1884 cookbook gives a simple recipe for a genoise:
Work together briskly in a basin half a pound of flour, half a pound of sugar and four eggs: after five minutes' good stirring, add a quarter of a pound of melted butter. Butter a square baking sheet, spread the paste upon it, and bake it in a moderate oven until it turns a golden yellow.
When finished baking, the sheet is rolled while still warm to make jelly rolls or bûches de Noël or cut and stacked into multiple layers or line a mold to be filled with a frozen dessert. A variety of fillings are used, such as jelly, chocolate, fruit, pastry cream and whipped cream. The genoise can be piped in strips to make ladyfingers or into molds to make madeleines. It is the base for Jaffa cakes, biscuit-sized cakes introduced in the UK in 1927 and named after Jaffa oranges.
The cake is notable for its elastic and somewhat dry texture and is sometimes soaked with flavored syrups or liquers and often served with a buttercream frosting. The popular tiramisu cake may be made with ladyfingers or a genoise sheet.
A chocolate genoise can be made by substituting cocoa powder for some of the flour and is sometimes used as a substitute for the richer cake used in the standard Sacher torte recipe.
Trifle is a dessert found in English and other cuisines. Made with fruit, a thin layer of sponge fingers commonly soaked in sherry or another fortified wine, and custard, the contents of a trifle are highly variable; many varieties exist, some forgoing fruit entirely and instead using other ingredients, such as chocolate, coffee or vanilla. The fruit and sponge layers may be suspended in fruit-flavored jelly, and these ingredients are usually arranged to produce three or four layers. The assembled dessert can be topped with whipped cream or, more traditionally, syllabub.
The name trifle was used for a dessert like a fruit fool in the sixteenth century; by the 18th century, Hannah Glasse records a recognizably modern trifle, with the inclusion of a gelatin jelly.
Many of the ingredients used in ancient trifles can be found in meats and other products found today. According to some scholars, trifle cakes might be the origin of modern sandwich cakes.
The earliest use of the name trifle was in a recipe for a thick cream flavored with sugar, ginger and rosewater, in Thomas Dawson's 1585 book of English cookery “The Good Huswifes Jewell.” Trifle evolved from a similar dessert known as a fool, and originally the two names were used interchangeably.
Jelly is first recorded as part of the recipe in later editions of Hannah Glasse's 18th century book “The Art of Cookery.” In her recipe she instructed using hartshorn or bones of calves' feet as the base ingredient to supply gelatin for the jelly. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of trifles containing jelly in 1861.
The trifle recipe from the early 19th-century cookery book “A New System of Domestic Cookery” by Maria Rundell is made with macaroons or ratafia biscuits soaked in raisin wine and topped with custard, raspberry jam and egg-white whipped cream. Chantilly cake trifle was made the same way with white cake replacing the biscuits.
Chocolate cake
Chocolate cake is a cake flavored with melted chocolate, cocoa powder or both. It can also include other ingredients. These include fudge, vanilla creme,and other sweeteners. The history of chocolate cake goes back to the 17th century, when cocoa powder from the Americas were added to traditional cake recipes. In 1828, Coenraad van Houten of the Netherlands developed a mechanical extraction method for extracting the fat from cacao liquor resulting in cacao butter and the partly defatted cacao, a compacted mass of solids that could be sold as it was "rock cacao" or ground into powder. The processes transformed chocolate from an exclusive luxury to an inexpensive daily snack. A process for making silkier and smoother chocolate called conching was developed in 1879 by Rodolphe Lindt and made it easier to bake with chocolate, as it amalgamates smoothly and completely with cake batters. Until 1890 to 1900, chocolate recipes were mostly for chocolate drinks, and its presence in cakes was only in fillings and glazes. In 1886, American cooks began adding chocolate to the cake batter, to make the first chocolate cakes in the U.S.
The Duff Co. of Pittsburgh, a molasses manufacturer, introduced Devil's food chocolate cake mixes in the mid-1930s, but introduction was put on hold during World War II. Duncan Hines introduced a "Three Star Special" — so called because a white, yellow or chocolate cake could be made from the same mix — three years after cake mixes from General Mills, and took over 48 percent of the market.
In the U.S., "chocolate decadence" cakes were popular in the 1980s; in the 1990s, single-serving molten chocolate cakes with liquid chocolate centers and infused chocolates with exotic flavors such as tea, curry, red pepper, passion fruit and champagne were popular. Chocolate lounges and artisanal chocolate makers were popular in the 2000s. Rich, flourless, all-but-flourless chocolate cakes are "now standard in the modern pâtisserie," according to “The New Taste of Chocolate” in 2001.
Coffee cake
Coffee cake is any cake intended to be eaten with coffee, however British coffee cake is typically a sponge cake flavored with coffee, typically baked in a circular shape with two layers separated by coffee butter icing, which also covers the top of the cake. Walnuts are a common addition, to make coffee and walnut cake. In the United States, coffee cake generally refers to a sweet cake intended to be eaten with coffee or tea like tea cake. The American variety is presented in a single layer, flavored with either fruit or cinnamon and leavened with either baking soda or baking powder, which results in a more cake-like texture, or yeast, which results in a more bread-like texture. They may be loaf-shaped, for easy slicing or baked in a Bundt or tube pan.
Coffee cake — also referred to as gugelhupf or Austrian German: kaffekuchen — evolved from other sweet dishes from Vienna. In the 17th century, Northern/Central Europeans are thought to have come up with the idea of eating sweet cakes while drinking coffee. As the region's countries were already known for their sweet yeast breads, the introduction of coffee in Europe led to the understanding that cakes were a great complement to the beverage. Immigrants from countries such as Germany and Scandinavia adjusted their recipes to their own liking and brought them to America. Though the cakes varied, they all contained ingredients such as yeast, flour, dried fruit and sweet spices. However, over time, the coffee cake recipes have changed as cheese, sugared fruit, yogurt and sour cream have been used, leading to a denser, more cake-like structure. In the 19th century, American cooks also used coffee as an ingredient to thriftily use up leftovers, reducing waste, to flavor the cake. The invention of pasteurization in America following World War I also led to the creation of a new kind of coffee cake, called sour cream coffee cake. Coffee cake is referenced in literary material as early as 1850 with references to gugelhupf going back to 1763.
Flourless cake
Baked flourless cakes include baked cheesecakes and flourless chocolate cakes. Cheesecakes, despite their name, are not cakes at all. Cheesecakes are custard pies, with a filling made mostly of some form of cheese — often cream cheese, mascarpone, ricotta or the like — and have very little flour added, although a flour-based or graham cracker crust may be used. Cheesecakes are also very old, with evidence of honey-sweetened cakes dating back to ancient Greece.
La Torta Tenerina is an Italian flourless chocolate cake that was first seen in Ferrara, Italy in 1900. It is the first recorded version of the cake. It has an alternative name, Queen of Montenegro, as it was said to be served when King Victor Emmanuel III took the throne of Italy making Elena Montenegro the Queen of Italy. In Ferrara, Italy La Torta Tenerina can be found on many restaurant and bakery menus.
Flourless chocolate cake is a common dessert among Jewish people during the holiday of Passover since grains cannot be consumed during that holiday. This makes flourless chocolate cake one of the few cakes that are kosher for Passover. Some flourless chocolate cakes made for Passover can be made with quinoa, which is still considered kosher as the grain was not discovered when the rules of the religions were written.
Flourless chocolate cake is a popular dessert in gluten-free diets. There are several varieties including topping the cake with a chocolate ganache, adding raspberries, or it is frequently served with vanilla ice cream, all of which can be enjoyed by those with gluten-free and celiac-appropriate diets. The use of alternative sugars would allow this cake to be enjoyed by those on a keto diet as well.
Layer cake
A layer cake (U.S. English) or sandwich cake (UK English) is a cake consisting of multiple stacked sheets of cake, held together by frosting or another type of filling, such as jam or other preserves. Most cake recipes can be made into layer cakes; butter cakes and sponge cakes are common choices. Frequently, the cake is covered with icing, but sometimes, the sides are left undecorated, so that the filling and the number of layers are visible.
Popular flavor combinations include the German chocolate cake, red velvet cake, Black Forest cake and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Many wedding cakes are decorated layer cakes.
In the mid-19th century, modern cakes were first described in English. Maria Parloa's “Appledore Cook Book,” published in Boston in 1872, contained one of the first layer cake recipes. Another early recipe for layer cake was published in “Cassell's New Universal Cookery Book,” published in London in 1894.
An older form of layer cake is common in southern and eastern Europe. The cake batter is baked in a frying pan in thin layers, about a half-inch thick in the finished stack. These layers are then covered with a thin layer of cream and/or jam and stacked 7 or 8 layers high. This stack, which is the same height as the typical Western layer cake, is then frosted so that the structure is not visible. At first glance, these cakes look much like a German konditorei style cake such as the Black Forest cake.
Layer cakes typically serve multiple people, so they are larger than cupcakes, petits fours or other individual pastries. A common layer cake size, which is baked in nine-inch round cake pans, typically serves about 16 people.
Unlike the Vietnamese Bánh da lợn or Swiss rolls, layer cake is assembled from several separate pieces of cake. A sheet cake can become a layer cake if it is cut into pieces and reassembled with frosting or other filling to form layers.
Most creative cakes
According to Julija Nėjė’s article “183 Of The Most Creative Cakes That Are Too Cool To Eat” at boredpanda.com, these cakes are perfect examples – we can't taste them (unfortunately), but most of them look as delicious as can be.
Library cake
"Up" cake inspired by the movie "Up"
"Pigs in the Mud" cake
Planet cake
Red dragon cake
Beer bucket cake
Polo shirt cake
Snake cake
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