Take a bake!
★ SLICE up your life and celebrate National Cake Week, which kicks off today. Brits love tucking into bakes three times a week, according to Protein World. And their survey found 44% of us would even prefer a piece to sex.
★ In fact, we splash out a whopping £1.2billion a year on our obsession. Here, JAMES MOORE has put together 15 filling facts…
CAKE comes from the Viking
1 word kaka, and both the ancient Egyptians and Romans liked to eat cake-style delicacies. But until the end of the Middle Ages, cakes were usually more like bread.
They became sweeter as sugar
2 took off in Britain and our classic sponge style is thought to have originated in Spain during the Renaissance period.
Chocolate cake was recently
3 voted the nation’s favourite, beating other popular types such as lemon drizzle. The Betty Crocker poll found each of us has typically baked six during lockdown.
Our favourite time to eat
4 cake is at 3pm and the most popular place to munch a slice is with friends at a coffee shop.
Official rules dictate the
5 difference between cakes and biscuits is that cakes go hard when stale but biscuits go soft.
The Jaffa Cake, inset
6 below, was officially ruled a cake, rather than a biscuit, in a 1991 VAT case. First launched in 1927, Mcvitie’s now produces a whopping two billion of the orange-flavoured treats every year.
Queen Victoria gave her name
7 to Victoria sponge cake and pioneered the idea of white icing on wedding cakes. Her own was three yards wide. Icing used to be spread on cakes with a feather.
The idea of birthday cakes
8 wasn’t mentioned until 1785 while the Christmas cake we know today only dates back to Victorian times.
According to an old English
9 superstition, putting a slice of fruit cake under your pillow would make you dream about the person you would marry.
The first mention of cupcakes
10 was in 1796. They were so called because they were baked in cups. The record for eating them is 72 in six minutes.
TV’S The Great British
11 Bake Off has boosted the popularity of terms such as “soggy bottom”. Contestant Iain Watters famously threw his baked Alaska in the bin because the ice cream had melted.
Battenberg cake was created
12 when Queen Victoria’s granddaughter wed Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884, while legend has it that the boozy, cherry-flavoured Black Forest gâteau was based on the design of local German women’s traditional costume.
There’s no evidence
13 Marie Antoinette really said “Let them eat cake!” on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. The saying
14 “you can’t have your cake and eat it” dates back to 1546, while “a piece of cake” was coined by writer Ogden Nash in 1936. Lockdown has led to us
15 spending an extra £150million on treats like cakes. The largest ever made, in 2008 in Indonesia, was 108ft tall!