Editing Cake (section)

===Cake mixes===
{{main|Baking mix}}
[[File:Cake mix in plastic packet photo.JPG|thumb|[[Baking mix|Cake mix]] in plastic packets]]
During the [[Great Depression]], there was a surplus of [[molasses]] and the need to provide easily made food to millions of economically depressed people in the United States.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/cake-mix-history |title=A History of the Cake Mix, the Invention That Redefined 'Baking' |last=Park |first=Michael |website=bonappetit.com |publisher=Bon Appétit |date=2013 |access-date=25 May 2014 |archive-date=25 October 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211025080936/https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/cake-mix-history |url-status=live }}</ref> One company patented a cake-bread mix to deal with this economic situation and thereby established the first line of cake in a box. In doing so, cake, as it is known today, became a [[mass production|mass-produced]] good rather than a home- or bakery-made specialty.

Later, during the [[post-war boom]], other American companies (notably [[General Mills]]) developed this idea further, marketing cake mix on the principle of convenience, especially to housewives. When sales dropped heavily in the 1950s, marketers discovered that baking cakes, once a task at which housewives could exercise skill and creativity, had become dispiriting. This was a period in American ideological history when women, retired from the war-time labor force, were confined to the [[Separate spheres|domestic sphere]] while still exposed to the blossoming consumerism in the US.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Catalano |first=Christina |year=2002 |title=Shaping the American Woman: Feminism and Advertising in the 1950s |url=http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=constructing |journal=Constructing the Past |volume=3 |issue=1 |page=45 |access-date=25 May 2014 |archive-date=27 November 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211127021616/https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=constructing |url-status=live }}</ref> This inspired [[psychologist]] [[Ernest Dichter]] to find a solution to the cake mix problem in the [[icing (food)|frosting]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp |title=Something Eggstra |website=Snopes.com |date=31 January 2008 |access-date=25 May 2014 |archive-date=5 December 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211205152008/https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/ |url-status=live }}</ref> Since making the cake was so simple, housewives and other in-home cake makers could expend their creative energy on [[cake decorating]] inspired by, among other things, photographs in magazines of elaborately decorated cakes.

Ever since boxed cake mix has become a staple of supermarkets, it is often complemented with frosting in a can.{{cn|date=April 2024}}