Pastries and Caked absolutely everywhere

[istheheatingonyet]

Being an oldie I can remember a slice of birthday cake was a great treat.
Now they are everywhere. Since lockdown there are coffee vans every 5 minutes, sausage rolls. At our " farmers market" there is stall after stall selling cake. A recently opened cafe selling cup cakes is absolutely booming.

Big change.

I think that there always have been cakes around, it's just now that slices & single cakes are much bigger than they used to be and that's before the inch thick icing is added to the top of them, whereas before you might get a small sprinkle of sugar or icing sugar on top of them if you were lucky.

My mum hung out in coffee bars as a teenager in the 60s. And her mum complained about not being able to get coffee anywhere during WW2, when they regularly had it at home and out before that.

Yea it's great!

I'm 60, my Nana and my Mum both baked but we also had Sayers cake shop opposite so I grew up on Devon Delights and Chocolate Eclairs along with the home made fruit pies and scones. And yes, there was Mr Kipling when we visited our aunts. Afternoon tea in John Lewis restaurant when we went into town with Nana. My treat was a banana split.
We also seemed to stuff into Mini Rolls, Jaffa Cakes etc all through the 1970's, crisps, KitKat and Club biscuits, Creme Eggs and Mars Bars but none of us were fat.

These days I don't eat bought cakes or biscuits, everything tastes too sweet to me now and chocolate makes me ache all over. It's funny how we change.

Cakes need to be home made, traditional type without too much sickly fake cream topping. My mum used to make lovely cakes

God yeah! A train station was just a train staion. Not a pastry shop.

Me too, treacle sponge. I think it's a Scottish thing. And wonderful apple pies.

@istheheatingonyet train stations have always had cafes and sold sweet treats, only in the 30s/40s/50s you would be more likely to sit down to tea and seed cake or sponge sandwich rather than "grabbing" a blueberry muffin or a pecan danish as people do now.

Cake has always been ubiquitous. More so when people had "tea" at 4pm.

I'm not anti cake or saying it wasn't around in various forms.Or pastries or savoury pastries.
The sweet stuff was a treat and a small one. The other a sneeky thing if you were out and about. I'm going back 50 years though now.
I think it's the treat thing that changed. Every event , every social gathering has this stuff now. As previously mentioned the likes of Nero with the cakes wasn't even about.

There Is cake everywhere. There are so many work from home bakers near me I don’t know how they all stay in business. As you say though, cakes were for birthdays, celebrations and anniversaries. Now it’s themed cupcakes and treat boxes for every occasion.

A baker I follow on FB for December alone does Elf arrival cupcakes/treat boxes, Grinch cupcakes, Xmas Eve kids treat boxes, adult treat boxes, Xmas Eve cupcakes and a brownie/blondie selection box. This came after bonfire cupcakes and Halloween cupcakes/treat boxes and will be followed by Valentines, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Easter.

I have the most divine Polish bakery near me though so I can’t complain too much. Absolutely worth the calories.

It was a railway station, dammit.

Cupcakes are the devil’s work. Bring back the fairy cake -plain or fruited - possibly with just a dab of glacé icing.

20 years ago was 2005 and you could get pastries at train stations at least 20 years before that. FFS you could get tea and a bun in a train platform in the 1930s!! What's with all the fake anti-nostalgia nonsense?

Oh like Brief Encounter you mean? A lady with a cockney accent and a giant urn?

I suppose I could have bought a pastry at a railway/train station in 2005.
It's a shame nostalgia isn't what it once was.

I think you're getting nostalgic for what you imagine to have been everyone's experience of eating/not eating cake outside the house at some unspecified point in the past -- I don't think I've ever regarded cake or pastries as anything to be eaten 'sneakily' when out. I'm in my 50s.

Or are you the type of person (my mother is one) who is incapable of looking at a cake without patting her stomach and saying 'Ooh, bad for the waistline!'?

Or are you the type of person (my mother is one) who is incapable of looking at a cake without patting her stomach and saying 'Ooh, bad for the waistline!'?

I don't know if this helps but I'm a good 2 stone overweight and resigned to the fact that that's how it is.
I do recall people surreptitiously eating a sausage roll in the street and being told by by mother it was rude to eat outdoors. A bygone era,never mind.

Honestly I blame social media pictures when it comes to cake. Or hot chocolate. The massive slices and piling on mile high icing and toppings thing is crazy. It’s built in wastefulness. I’m not nostalgic for a specific time, never been to a tea room, cake shops weren’t on my radar as a kid, I was all about sweets for me. My mum hasn’t cooked a cake in her life.

But I do love professional expertise in baking and want to support it, and as an adult I do want to be able to buy good tasting cakes with decent ingredients not huge cakes covered in cheap sweets and biscuits.

The pastry wall to wall issue is that lifestyles have changed and everyone is working more so yes we do need eg petrol stations to sell food at all hours etc. But we haven’t got expectations high enough not is pay sufficient to have have household budgets big enough that it’s healthy or good quality food on offer at all the hours, hence all the pastries.

Life would be pretty miserable without a nice piece of cake and a coffee every now again.

Got to take the small nice things in this sometimes awful world we seem to be living in at the moment.

I love it, nice to see businesses out there and nice to have a lovely treat if we feel like it. Life is hard.

Though it's jarring how we are constantly told drinking alcohol and eating crap is bad for us, more health aware than ever, nhs in crisis yet we are surrounded by alcohol and treats and fast food more than ever. It's like some massive test to prove humans weakness.

Nearly 60 here, when I grew up 'Cookery' at school meant 'learning to bake cakes'. It was seen as a good, housewifely skill. I also wonder if there was a bit of a hangover from rationing - like, 'Yay, sugar at last!'

My mother made great cakes, but come the 70s, the likes of Mr Kipling started to creep into the house, and heathens that we were, us kids preferred them... mostly because they looked cuter (and I wonder if some of today's Cake Prevalence is because they photograph well?) But they were definitely A Treat.

I'm a baking refusenik now, but the other day I was enjoying a slice of shop-bought Christmas cake, and looked at the ingredients, and it had stuff like 'bamboo fibre', 'potato starch' and the ubiquitous 'xanthan gum' in it, and just... I think I need to re-educate my palate...

Absobloodylutely!
Baffled as to why Op thinks cake has just been invented
Stuff and nonsense.

Mmmm seed cake!
Brief Encounter has always been one of my favourite films and they also had ... gasp chocolate " Milk or plain? "

" My feet are almost off" 😂

I think home baked goods are so popular because not everyone has the time or skills to bake anymore. A bit like hand knitted jumpers, but more affordable.

What I hate is seeing, say, a jammy dodger, pushed into the top of, say, a brownie. That's 2 snacks, not one.

Baffled as to why Op thinks cake has just been invented
Stuff and nonsense

I didn't say that. My first post mentions birthday cake.

Yes! A jammy dodger is a biscuit, not a sprinkle.

The refreshment room scenes in brief encounter were central to the plot, and the setting was everyday. Because most train stations had a refreshment room, with tea/coffee and cakes and sandwiches, it was the norm.
And for a long time before that, it was entirely normal to have "tea" in the afternoon, with bread and butter or toasted crumpets, and cake. Cake was an everyday thing, for those who could afford it.

Your premise is entirely faulty

Your premise is entirely faulty

But I don't have one?

I said I remember cake being a very occasional treat. Now, particularly after lockdown there are more vans serving cake in my area.
Portions seem bigger.

That's it! People have contributed their experiences which make for interesting reading.

The train station where I grew up had no stalls or outlets. It had a horrible waiting area and I'm pretty sure you could get a hot drink. There were some cakes under a glass cloche which looked unappealing.

That's it.

Never mind, can't be bothered to scrap about baked goods.