Birthdays: The Twentieth-Century Birthday Industry

In the course of the twentieth century, the homemade birthday cake depended increasingly on purchased cake mixes. The use of mixes was reinforced by such guides as The Cake Mix Doctor. Available in white, spiced, and devil’s food flavors, these mixes made suitable birthday cakes. In the twenty-first century, many adults thought of cake mixes when they remembered the so-called homemade birthday cakes of their childhoods.

Commercial novelty cakes found a new direction. In the late 1930s Carvel, combining traditional party ice cream with cake, developed ice cream cakes often made in cartoon character shapes. Cakes of unusual size were newsworthy, for example the 128,238-pound cake honoring the one-hundredth birthday of Fort Payne, Alabama. In the early 2000s, the American emphasis on individualism found expression in vegetarian or vegan cake recipes, special interests, favorite flavors of cakes, or even life-size portraits in cake, increasing the province of professional party designers. Cakes are often made in a format or with designs expressing the celebrant’s interests, such as golf, football, or gardening. Despite the attractions of the new professionalism in the birthday industry, numbers of how-to publications such as The Birthday Cake Book and Colette’s Birthday Cakes seemed to indicate that baking from scratch and homemade birthday parties were still alive in American culture.