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A cake is a form of food that is usually sweet and often baked. Cakes normally combine some kind of flour, a sweetening agent (commonly sugar), a binding agent (generally egg, though gluten or starch are often used by vegetarians and vegans), fats (usually butter or margarine, although a fruit puree can be substituted to avoid using fat), a liquid (milk, water or fruit juice), flavors and some form of leavening agent (such as yeast or baking powder).
Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries and birthdays.
Baking a cake
Prepackaged cake mixes were first introduced to American grocery store shelves in the 1940s by companies including Betty Crocker and General Mills, who touted the use of their product as more convenient and resistant to human error than the process of baking a cake from scratch.
The original Betty Crocker Cake Mix, requiring only water to be added, sold poorly. The company conducted a survey to find out why, and discovered that housewives felt guilty, believing that by making something so easy to bake, they were cheating their families. The company responded by changing the recipe to require an egg to be mixed in, and sales turned sharply upward.