Use tab to cake toppings through the menu items. An easy ginger traybake cake that’s sticky, sweet and subtly spiced.

A perfect tea-time treat for the colder months. Cakes are best stored in airtight tins rather than plastic boxes. Once a cake has been cut, the cut surfaces will start to dry. Covering them with a piece of aluminium foil minimises the effect. Undecorated cakes can be frozen for up to three months if tightly wrapped.

It’s essential to accurately weigh and measure cake ingredients and to follow the instructions carefully. The ingredients need to be at the correct temperature before you start. For example, many cake recipes specify soft, chilled or frozen butter, and eggs at room temperature, in order to achieve a specific effect. Where caster sugar is specified, coarser granulated sugar or fine icing sugar are not acceptable substitutes as they’ll create detrimental effects, such as a speckled finish or failure to hold air bubbles in the batter. Darker sugars such as unrefined molasses sugar or muscovado are great for baking but will give a darker colour, deeper flavour and moister texture than caster sugar, so need to be used in their appropriate recipes. Similarly, with flour, don’t try to use strong bread flour in place of plain or self-raising flour because its gluten level is much higher. This will result in an uneven rise and a tough cake.

You can, however, substitute plain flour for self-raising by adding sufficient raising agents. Cake Frosting, or as Cake script using Cake . See Runners for a list of available runners. There are extensions available to provide advanced features for most popular IDEs and editors. See Editors for detailed feature list. Cake will always be free and open source, even for commercial use. If you want to support us we accept donations.

There’s an amazing community around Cake with several hundred contributors which are involved in the project and we would love to have you on board too. This is the easy vanilla cupcake recipe we turn to for bake sales and school functions. It’s quick and easy and fairly foolproof. Get creative with the sprinkles or add a few drops of food colouring to brighten them up. Use our cake calculator to customise the recipe!

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking. If you’re new to baking or need a really easy cake recipe, we have the ideas for you, including a yoghurt cake that you don’t need scales to make. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Cake is a flour confection made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients, and is usually baked.

Cake is often served as a celebratory dish on ceremonial occasions, such as weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. The term “cake” has a long history. The word itself is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse word “kaka”. 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. 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, 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. 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. Ever since cake in a box has become a staple of supermarkets and is complemented with frosting in a can. Cakes are broadly divided into several categories, based primarily on ingredients and mixing techniques. Although clear examples of the difference between cake and bread are easy to find, the precise classification has always been elusive. Butter cakes are made from creamed butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. They rely on the combination of butter and sugar beaten for an extended time to incorporate air into the batter.