Summer Friday: Why Do We Eat Birthday Cake?

From an ancient candlelit religious offering to a modern personal celebration

A round cake. A ring of little flames on top. A crowd gathered to watch it carried in. You’re probably picturing a birthday party. But this scene is actually unfolding in a temple in ancient Athens, the cake is an offering, and the guest of honor is the moon.

Every spring, at a festival called the Mounichia, Athenians brought round cakes to Artemis, goddess of the moon, with little torches stuck around the rim so the whole thing glowed. This ritual shows up in the works of ancient writers and on Greek vase paintings of women carrying the glowing cakes in procession. The ritual — which was tied to the spring and the notion of rebirth — may have been one of the earliest inspirations for the birthday cakes we celebrate with today. The candles on Artemis’s cakes were meant to mimic moonlight and carry prayers skyward.

Though a forerunner to modern cake, the ancient cake looked nothing like what we get in a bakery these days or bake at home. The earliest “cakes” were closer to sweetened bread — grain, maybe a little honey. The Bible mentions cakes of figs and raisins, too (1 Chronicles 12:40). Food historians don’t agree on when the first real cake showed up, but most tell the same broad story: cake evolved from bread and honey.

Cake was sacred before it became festive. In the ancient world, sweet cakes were baked as offerings to the gods — the Greeks carried honey cakes to their temples, and the Romans took another step: linking it to birthday celebrations, first only for their emperor in the early period of the Roman Empire but subsequently extended to wealthy commoners.

But the tradition didn’t take off right away. After the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, early Christians saw celebrating a person’s birthday as a pagan Roman habit. Instead, through much of the Middle Ages, Europeans marked their saint’s day or name day — the feast day of the saint they were named for — instead of the day they were born. Lighting candles had long been an act of devotion — in Catholic Europe, one lit them for the saints. The personal birthday — and the cake and candles with it — didn’t really resurface until early-modern Europe — and by the 1700s it had a clear home: Germany.

The cake as we know it

By the 18th century, German families were holding kinderfeste, birthday parties for children, with a candle on the cake for each year of the child’s life plus one extra. The burning candles would be replaced all day long until the cake was eaten. Kinderfeste came about during a period when people began to treat childhood as something “special” and worth celebrating, which gave the birthday new weight. That understanding of childhood has endured into the modern era, along with birthday celebrations. Blowing out candles and making a silent wish, as historian Marie Nicola notes, transformed the religious practice of lighting candles for devotion into something domestic and secular.

The birthday cake in America

In the 19th century, as German immigrants came over to America, they brought the candles-on-cake custom with them and it took hold in the US.

But it stayed a wealthy family’s affair for a while. Around the 1830s, birthday celebrations with family and friends, cakes, and gifts were primarily popular with wealthy Protestant families in the United States, and later trickled down the social ladder.

Until the mid-19th century, Americans paid little attention to exact age, as historian Howard Chudacoff documents in How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture. One-room schoolhouses mixed every age together, children worked alongside adults. That changed late in the century. As age-graded schools and standardized record-keeping spread, Americans grew newly conscious of age and the calendar. It was no surprise then that the birthday became something worth marking and celebrating.

By the first half of the 20th century, the custom of holding birthday parties had taken hold in the US.

According to historian Elizabeth Pleck, early children’s birthday parties were parent-directed social events. They were formal, often included dozens of guests chosen by the parents, and were especially common for girls as a way to teach etiquette and social customs. Americans increasingly saw children less as contributors to the family’s income and more as cherished members of the family, so birthday celebrations became more and more widespread.

Cake itself also became more accessible. For a long time, cake was out of reach for the average person. Sugar was expensive and baking was real labor, so cake was mostly a wealthy household’s treat. But during the Industrial Revolution, sugar got cheaper, milling and baking improved, and the ingredients finally reached ordinary kitchens.

Once sugar became cheaper, it also led to commercial bakeries that made cakes and other items in bulk. Now cakes were mass produced not just for birthdays but for other occasions as well. Thus, by the turn of the 20th century the birthday cake was a fixture of American family life, helped along by commercial bakeries, cheap candles, ready-made icing and, eventually, the boxed mix.

A couple of the other traditions we treat as ancient are surprisingly young. For example, the song “Happy Birthday to You” began in 1893 as a kindergarten greeting song called “Good Morning to All,” written by two Kentucky sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill. The birthday words came later, and the song got linked to the cake as American birthday parties grew more common and widespread. The wish-before-you-blow ritual, meanwhile, likely grew out of older European folk belief that smoke carried your wish up to the heavens.

Today the cake comes in every form imaginable — chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, ice cream, cookie, and shapes from dinosaurs to sports cars. The flavors and looks might be different, but the ritual stays the same. People gather. Candles get lit. Somebody makes a wish. Everybody sings.

And then, somebody cuts the cake.