Have people just got a lot better at baking?

[Sunflowering]

Or is it just me?

When I was little (born late 70s) home baking was a popular pastime but generally the things people made weren't that brilliant- homemade bread was always like a brick, homemade cake was generally an overcooked sponge that had gone a bit wrong or rock cakes. Or chocolate cake made by swapping a spoonful of flour for cocoa. All gratefully eaten by me obviously but pretty hit and miss.

Now everyone I know who bakes (including myself) makes things which are pretty much as good as you'd get from a professional baker. Homemade bread is a treat. Cakes are almost always perfect and far more elaborate than anyone would have attempted at home in the 70s-80s.

Just wondered if other people had found this? I can think of various reasons- the popularity of baking shows as inspiration, the internet as a source of knowledge, people maybe spending more on ingredients, more reliable ovens etc. But I wondered whether other people had noticed the phenomenon. Maybe my mum and her friends were just shit cooks, but even my mum has upped her game now.

Also can be observed in kids birthday cakes which used to either be a supermarket purchase for us 80s kids, or maybe a homemade vanilla tray bake which your mum would then make a shit attempt at cutting into a shape or number. Now people either seem to spend £50+ on professionally made cakes (even for a toddlers birthday which IMO is madness and a total waste of money) or baking elaborate homemade cakes.

I wouldn't say that was the norm.

Perhaps people are more competitive. My parents didnt really work out nor did friends/family. Now parents do Iron man & marathons as standard.

I think decorating has got better because of the cheap piping/moulding/decorating equipment and endless step by step tutorials available.

Have the cakes underneath all that bumf improved? I'd say the opposite. Everything is style over substance and often tastes crap, but it's perfect for taking a picture and posting on social media.

I have copies of all my DNan's recipes from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and whilst I substitute some original ingredients with modern day upgrades, there is no denying that they produce excellent tasting cakes and biscuits.

I think you're correct in that the internet makes it easier to fix problems with baking. But my mum would bake quite elaborate cakes from recipe books and went to icing classes. She couldn't bake bread to save her life though - and I make it quite often, rarely goes wrong.
Quite a lot of my baking is from a '70s M&S book.

I think the Internet helped massively, now you can watch a video and see exactly what it's supposed to look like and consistency etc
I love Tik tok and instagram for recipes, I made a delicious chicken pie from one 😋

I must be some sort of dinosaur, I like to bake when I get the chance, but it's not pro-level. I can do a great Victoria Sponge, but have no patience for icing, so tend to stick to glace + sprinkles for cupcakes and traybakes.

@PuttingDownRoots i agree with you. I cannot bake. My cakes never turn out how I hope. But I’m pretty epic at decorating. Luckily I only make kids birthday cakes and they don’t seem to care what it tastes like so my secret is safe

Well, of course?

There's a million different websites with recipes, your bog-standard cook books for the purists, and bake off and it's supporting websites, books, tiktoks etc. We've never been more surrounded by support and easy to follow recipes.

baking is like cycling. It used to just be what people did, some more than others, some better than others. Now it is a fancy hobby and competitive and expensive as a result

@henrypenry maybe it’s just my area. I have been to numerous kids parties and I can only remember there being one obviously supermarket-bought cake. All the others were either professional cakes to fit with the party theme (Frozen etc) or homemade to an Instagram-level (multiple tiers, ombré icing, or elaborate decorations etc. Not necessarily matched in flavour though… didn’t try them myself!)

I haven't baked since school Home Ec classes! Sounds like it has all moved on since the day of wholemeal scones so hard they would make impressive weapons

I think we forget that the recipes being baked in the 70s were still very heavily influenced by rationing- a generation had grown up being used to the idea that it wasn’t what you were willing to spend on butter and eggs that was the limiting factor, but simply that there was a hard limit on how much you could ever have. Recipes made with one egg are always going to be stodgy compared to recipes made with four.

I think decorating has got better because of the cheap piping/moulding/decorating equipment and endless step by step tutorials available.

Have the cakes underneath all that bumf improved? I'd say the opposite. Everything is style over substance and often tastes crap, but it's perfect for taking a picture and posting on social media.

Completely agree. I don't like lots of icing and I hate dry cake. If I'm going to eat something calorific, I want it to taste good and be a real treat. Sweet, sickly icing does nothing for me.

As an aside, one of the many reasons so many people are now overweight must surely be the huge size of muffins and cookies (US imports in both cases) and the enormous amount of icing sugar and fat used to decorate them, often washed down with sugary drinks. Bring back the small fairy cakes with a blob of glace icing and half a glace cherry!

Also, I was born in the early 1960s and I can confirm:

1. We had cake mix in shops back in the 60s and 70s.
2. We had electric hand whisks. It's a mystery to me why anybody needs an expensive machine on a stand when a cheap hand whisk and a big mixing bowl do a perfectly good job and are much easier to store.
3. We had decent recipe books. Delia Smith got going in the 1970s and is still my favourite because her recipes always work.
4. Many, many children (probably mostly girls) learned to bake at home. I did. All the women in my family were excellent plain cooks and bakers.
5. Most girls (not many boys, to be fair) learned how to do simple baking at school. My mum didn't make shortcrust pastry but I learned that in Home Economics lessons.

This thread has inspired me to bake a strawberry and white chocolate cake loaf 😂

Not in my experience. My family just reverted to the old recipes as soon as the ingredients were freely available again.

I've always baked, I remember baking from dm's Bero book. It's easier now with electric scales, stand mixers, food processors, more accurate ovens. I bake mostly because we don't like cake smothered in frosting and icing. For school bake sales my little iced fairy cakes with sweets or sprinkles always sold well.

I think people put a lot more effort in these days instead of being ‘better’

GBBO and lockdown gave us more confidence and time

I did a simple chocolate Victoria sponge like I would have done decades ago, and as you say OP, substituting a couple of spoons of flour for cocoa. It was so disappointing!

We are so spoilt by rich brownies, devil's food cake, ganaches etc now a simple chocolate sponge doesn't cut it.

My mum made lovely cakes, but not particularly fancy ones with decorative icing etc.

I still prefer an old-school fairy cake with some lemon glacé icing than a huge cupcake with piped buttercream though 🤷‍♀️

I don't know that I agree that access to decent ingredients is 'spoiling' us... we used to eat stuff that tasted like fuck all (particularly chocolate sponges that were just brown and did not taste like chocolate at all!)...

I do think access to cooking videos makes a huge difference. Lots of people learn better from seeing, rather than reading, and seeing what each stage is meant to look like can REALLY help avoid disasters!

I disagree. I think it’s all show now and tend to taste awful and most of the time are just over complicated for no real benefit. The amount of homemade soggy/dense/dry cakes I’ve sampled in recent years is shocking. It tends to be somebody who thinks of themselves as a good baker so everyone tells them it’s lovely to not hurt their feelings and they carry on with confidence. A lot of cafes also serve synthetic tasting cake that your grandmother would be ashamed of. I think our mothers and grandmothers were far superior in the kitchen and actually understood how to bake properly.

As others have said, ovens are better, equipment is better ( my nan used to beat her butter and sugar with a wooden spoon and as a result had arms like a Russian shot putter) whereas now I use an electric mixer.

Plus people use the internet for inspo/presentation.

I think they look prettier, dunno if they taste better. I'm not really a cake person. Although dd8 and I love watching is it cake on Netflix.