Cake is not just an irresistibly delicious treat — it's also an excellent way to trace Australia's history.
From ancient First Nations traditions to cooking under war rations, Women's Weekly birthday recipes and sweet sources of contentious national pride, cake plays a pivotal role in this country's past and present.
Here, we tuck into some of the stories that showcase how.
Baking was here long before colonisers were
Indigenous Australian baking traditions go back thousands of years, chef and cookbook author Aunty Dale Chapman tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
That includes scones, damper and dough used in various ways. Traditional baking involved wooden coals, stone, fire and ashes, Chapman explains.
"Aboriginal people would come together and celebrate their foods [using] a whole different range of cooking methods," she says.
"There are lots of different ways that the grains and [other ingredients] were made into cakes."
Baking was done by roasting on coals or ashes, or by boiling and steaming in ground ovens — practices still used today.
"When you make a Kup-Murri or a ground oven, you dig a hole, you build a fire [and] stones are placed in there which will keep the heat and keep things cooking," Chapman says.
Depending where the person was in Australia, they might use paperbark or banana leaf to wrap the food.
"They would collect all the different wattles and the native millet and kangaroo grass and bunya nuts — whatever resources that were there in your tribal group area — and then you'd bring them together and grind them up on grinding rocks. They were mushed up to make a flour and sometimes you would add a little bit of water to it to make it into more of a dough," she says.
Sometimes animal fat was added to the dough, too.
"I remember doing it; you put the bunya nuts in the fire, take them out, crack them open, get all the yummy meat out of it, grind it all up, add some echidna fat, and that kept it really moist," she says.
The dough could then be baked on big, flat, heated rocks, or it could be put straight into the coals to cook.
Cooking under rations
For many Australians, austerity in the 1940s meant cooking was dictated by rations, explains Jacinta Sutton, who works in the collections team at the State Library of Queensland.
Sutton is also a producer of the library's audible exploration of cake history, Cake the podcast.
"During the war years, we can see that those little cookbooks became a lot thinner, a lot smaller, with less colour, and all of the recipes started to change to substitute things that you may not have," she says.
For example dripping — the leftover fat from cooked meat — became a common substitute for the more expensive and harder-to-find butter. Powdered milk offered an alternative to fresh milk.
"I think it's a testament of Australians in general to be able to adapt to tough conditions and baking was no exception," Sutton says.
Myth of the lamington
"There's a big competition around the origin of the lamington," Sutton explains.
There isn't "one single point of truth" — but there are some great theories.
They include that a sponge cake was accidentally dropped into gravy before being thrown into a dish of coconut, or that New Zealand or Scotland can in fact lay claim to its invention.
Sutton says the more plausible theory involves Lord and Lady Lamington (Lord Lamington was the governor of Queensland from 1896–1901).
The theory goes that the couple's French chef may have invented the recipe while trying to stretch the life of stale cake, by dipping it in chocolate and rolling it in coconut.
Genius, if true.
"We do know that the first recorded recipe … is in the Queensland Country Life newspaper in 1900. There isn't anything before that. So Queensland has quite a good stake there," Sutton says.
Cake made Australia's 'first influencer'
Sutton considers cookbook author and cake-lover Ruby Borrowdale to be "our first influencer".
In 1962, Borrowdale's The Golden Circle Tropical Cookbook — the clever solution to a glut of pineapples — sold half a million copies. "It went absolutely bonkers," Sutton says.
So did Borrowdale's popularity.
She marketed herself deftly, had sponsorships with Simpson's flour and Golden Circle pineapple, wrote a newspaper cooking column and was the first Queensland cook to appear on TV — just a few months after the technology debuted in Australian homes.
Her modern, trendy influence reached women who were cooking for their families across the country, Sutton says.
"Ruby really pushed for cooking and the joy of cooking … and baking was her favourite thing. Out of all types of different cooking, she did enjoy cakes and baking [the most]."
Cake's modern iteration
Kaitlyn Sawrey, the host and co-producer of Cake the podcast, argues that today, Australian cakes are up there with the best in the world.
"Cake-making in Queensland and Australia has really evolved from making do to showing off," she says.
She points to Australian cake-makers' huge presence online and at the recent International Cake Show in Brisbane (think photo-realistic cake replicas of the Men in Black and cake the size of a car).
"It's really next level," Sawrey says.
And Aunty Dale Chapman says there are now "fantastic" moves to "incorporate all the beautiful ancient flavours and spices into everyday modern cooking".
That includes a rediscovery of native ingredients — strawberry gum berry, pepperberry and saltbush, to name but a few — and native grain as an alternative to wheat.
"The whole country was covered in native grain, and unfortunately, when all the hoofed animals came in, they started to eat it as fodder," Chapman says.
"It can still be used as that. But it can also be harvested as a nutritious grain — and most of our native grains are gluten free, an element these days that's really sought after.
"It's an invaluable source for the future."
Cake the podcast is available to listen to at the ABC Listen app.
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