Birthdays: Ornamentation

Writing on birthday cakes began with professional bakers and caterers, who were proliferating in growing cities. The cakes of the late 1800s were decorated with inscriptions like “Many Happy Returns of the Day” and the celebrant’s name, a tradition that continues into the twenty-first century. Sometimes the cake was home-baked but then decorated by a specialist. A typical inscription might read, “Mabel Smither July 8th 1885 from Dick and Lizzie.” The phrase “Happy Birthday” did not appear on birthday cake messages until the popularization of the now-ubiquitous song “Happy Birthday to You” (1910). Cookbook authors began to recommend decorating with birth dates and names and offered instruction on how to make colored frostings with such ingredients as parsley and beets. Some taught home bakers to make their own pastry bags, which were used to dispense the decorative frostings. By 1958, A. H. Vogel had begun to manufacture preformed cake decorations. Inexpensive letters, numbers, and pictorial images, such as flowers or bows, with matching candleholders were standard supermarket offerings.