Single Greeting Card - Layer Cakes
4.25 x 5.5" (A2 size)
Kraft brown bag envelope with coordinating liner
Blank inside
Supporting sustainability: 100% recycled post-consumer waste card and envelope; 30% post-consumer waste envelope liner; commercially compostable plastic sleeve.
You don't need a birthday to love a cat and a cake. Our cat will accept cake (or bread, or pizza crust) any day of the week. He was a stray before he found us and we like to think he braved the elements by stationing himself outside a bakery for crumbs and nibbly bits.
Each Cats and Cakes card includes curious cake-related historical discoveries on the back.
Text on the back of this card:
Layer Cakes
from the Cats and Cakes Collection
Early layer cakes included "sandwich cakes," which sound to me like a tall stack of pancakes layered with jam. Not a bad option when your 17th century cookbook also lists recipes for "pigeon compote" and "how to make a calf's head the best way."
By the 1850s, a number of circumstances helped gift frosted layer cakes to the everywoman including baking powder (first made from animal bones), cast iron cookstoves, machines for milling flour, the ingenuity to make sugar from beets, and an international economy of slave or indentured labor. Not to mention hand-cranked mixers! One model marketed itself for mixing food and paint (hopefully not at the same time). Up till then, butter was softened by hand — literally: "take two pounds butter and beat it with your hand in a puter dish for an hour over a very few coles just to keep it a little warm."
Fortunately for layer cakes, those mixers allowed for thicker frostings to keep mile-high layers from sliding onto the floor.