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A cake is a form of food that is usually sweet and often baked. Cakes normally combine some kind of flour, a sweetening agent (commonly sugar), a binding agent (generally egg, though gluten or starch are often used by vegetarians and vegans), fats (usually butter or margarine, although a fruit puree can be substituted to avoid using fat), a liquid (milk, water or fruit juice), flavors and some form of leavening agent (such as yeast or baking powder).
Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries and birthdays.

Baking a cake

Layered chocolate cake with chocolate icing. There is also a piped design on the top of the cake. Since cakes are often iced or frosted, the term cake usually refers to the entire finished object: the cake and its frosting (topping). However, cake also refers to the part that is typically made from flour.

Cake baking ingredients and methods

Cream tart
Most cakes are made with wheat flour and therefore have some amount of gluten, which means special care needs to be taken to ensure cakes don't have a chewy texture. The cake ingredients are mixed as little as possible once the flour has been added. This differs markedly from sturdy food items made with flour such as bread, where the goal is to agitate the gluten as much as possible. The wheat flour selected to be used for cakes is often one naturally lower in gluten. Cakes often rely on beating eggs and addition of leavening agents, such as baking powder, to produce the air bubbles in the cake. This is what makes a traditional cake fluffy and sponge-like.

Cake mixes

Cake mix is usually packaged inside plastic bags and often comes with icing mix
Cake mixes are often used at home because they are convenient. Most cake mixes simply require adding the package contents to eggs and oil in a bowl and mixing for two to three minutes. The mixture is then ready to be poured into pans and baked. The powder mix requires the addition of ingredients before baking. Typically, a modern cake mix contains flour, sugar, shortening, leavening agents, and appropriate flavorings, and instructs the user to add egg, oil and/or some form of water to the mix before baking. Some mixes do not require eggs or oil.
Prepackaged cake mixes were first introduced to American grocery store shelves in the 1940s by companies including Betty Crocker and General Mills, who touted the use of their product as more convenient and resistant to human error than the process of baking a cake from scratch.
The original Betty Crocker Cake Mix, requiring only water to be added, sold poorly. The company conducted a survey to find out why, and discovered that housewives felt guilty, believing that by making something so easy to bake, they were cheating their families. The company responded by changing the recipe to require an egg to be mixed in, and sales turned sharply upward.

Cake decorating methods

A finished cake is often enhanced by covering it with frosting, or icing, and toppings such as sprinkles, which are also known as "jimmies" in certain parts of the United States. Frosting is usually made from a fat of some sort, powdered (icing) sugar, sometimes milk or cream, and often flavourings such as vanilla extract or cocoa powder. Some decorators use a rolled fondant icing. Commercial bakeries tend to use lard for the fat, and often whip the lard to introduce air bubbles. This makes the icing light and spreadable. Home bakers either use lard, butter, margarine or some combination thereof. Sprinkles are small firm pieces of sugar and oils that are colored with food colouring. In the late 20th century, new cake decorating products became available to the public. These include several specialized sprinkles and even methods to print pictures and transfer the image onto a cake.
Cake decorating classes are popular. Special tools are needed for more complex cake decorating, such as piping bags or syringes, and various piping tips. To use a piping bag or syringe, a piping tip is attached to the bag or syringe using a coupler. The bag or syringe is partially filled with icing which is sometimes colored. Using different piping tips and various techniques, a cake decorator can make many different designs. Basic decorating tips include open star, closed star, basketweave, round, drop flower, leaf, multi, petal, and specialty tips.
Popular icing types include Butter Cream icing, which is made from butter, or cream cheese icing, which is typically made by replacing half the butter of an icing recipe with regular cream cheese.

A cake iced in the shape of a basket, with marzipan flowers
Layered cakes are cakes with more than one cake or ingredient stacked on top of one another. Layered cakes can consist of cake along with fruits and other fillings such as custard or icing, or several thin cakes with icing in between the layers. The latter type is produced by either baking several thin cakes or baking a thick cake and carefully cutting the cake horizontally. The traditional Victoria Sandwich is the most common type of layer cake in the UK. In the United Kingdom there is a long and diverse tradition of cake decoration. Those who do it seriously tend to bake their cakes without the use of cake mixes, i.e., using traditional methods of baking. Royal Icing, Marzipan (or a less sweet version, known as Almond paste), Fondant Icing (also known as Sugarpaste) and Buttercream are used as covering icings and to create decorations. Floral Sugarcraft or Wired Sugar Flowers are an important part of Cake Decoration. Special occasion cakes, such as wedding cakes, are traditionally rich fruit cakes, or occasionally Madeira cake (also known as whisked or fatless sponge),

A cake decorated with "chocolate plastic," a fondant rose and chocolate leaves.
covered with marzipan and either Royal Iced or sugarpasted, finished with Royal Iced piped borders and adorned with a piped message, wired sugar flowers, hand-formed fondant flowers or marzipan fruit, piped flowers, or crystallized fruits or flowers such as grapes or violets. More recently it has become popular to have a mixture of both rich fruit cakes and sponge cakes in a single cake, either stacked or on stands for these occasions. These sponge cakes would be split and filled with preserve and/or buttercream and covered in sugarpaste. Similar traditions exist in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and New Zealand.
[edit] Facts about Cake