Cake is a flour confection made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients and is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread, but cakes now cover a wide range of preparations that can be simple or elaborate and which share features with desserts such as pastries, meringues, custards, and pies.
Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on sweetened milk, cheese, or cream cooked with egg or egg yolk to thicken it, and sometimes also flour, corn starch, or gelatin. Depending on the recipe, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce to the thick pastry cream used to fill éclairs. The most common custards are used in custard desserts or dessert sauces and typically include sugar and vanilla; however, savory custards are also found, e.g., in quiche.
Pound cake is a type of cake traditionally made with a pound of each of four ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. Pound cakes are generally baked in either a loaf pan or a Bundt mold. They are sometimes served either dusted with powdered sugar, lightly glazed, or with a coat of icing.
Crème caramel, flan, caramel pudding, condensed milk pudding or caramel custard is a custard dessert with a layer of clear caramel sauce.
Cheesecake is a dessert made with a soft fresh cheese, eggs, and sugar. It may have a crust or base made from crushed cookies, graham crackers, pastry, or sometimes sponge cake. Cheesecake may be baked or unbaked, and is usually refrigerated.
Fruitcake or fruit cake is a cake made with candied or dried fruit, nuts, and spices, and optionally soaked in spirits. In the United Kingdom, certain rich versions may be iced and decorated.
Rice pudding is a dish made from rice mixed with water or milk and commonly other ingredients such as sweeteners, spices, flavourings and sometimes eggs.
Stollen is a fruit bread of nuts, spices, and dried or candied fruit, coated with powdered sugar or icing sugar and often containing marzipan. It is a traditional German Christmas bread. During the Christmas season the cake-like loaves are called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen. A ring-shaped Stollen made in a Bundt cake or Gugelhupf pan is called a Stollenkranz.
Apple cakes are cakes in which apples feature as a main flavour and ingredient. Such cakes incorporate apples in a variety of forms, including diced, pureed, or stewed, and can include common additions like raisins, nuts, and 'sweet' spices such as cinnamon or nutmeg. They are a common and popular dessert worldwide, thanks to millennia of apple cultivation in Asia and Europe, and their widespread introduction and propagation throughout the Americas during the Columbian Exchange and colonisation. As a result, apple desserts, including cakes, have a huge number of variations.
Chocolate cake or chocolate gâteau is a cake flavored with melted chocolate, cocoa powder, or both. It can also have other ingredients such as fudge, vanilla creme, and other sweeteners.
Flourless chocolate cake is a dense cake made from an aerated chocolate custard. The origin of the cake is not clear. The dessert contains no gluten, which makes it acceptable for those with celiac disease, gluten-free diets, and during religious holidays in which gluten and grains are not permitted.
Bread and butter pudding is a traditional bread pudding in British cuisine. Slices of buttered bread scattered with raisins are layered in an oven dish, covered with an egg custard mixture seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, or other spices, then baked.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chocolate:
Sponge cake is a light cake made with eggs, flour and sugar, sometimes leavened with baking powder. Some sponge cakes do not contain egg yolks, like angel food cake, but most of them do. Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain. The sponge cake is thought to be one of the first non-yeasted cakes, and the earliest attested sponge cake recipe in English is found in a book by the English poet Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman (1615). Still, the cake was much more like a cracker: thin and crispy. Sponge cakes became the cake recognised today when bakers started using beaten eggs as a rising agent in the mid-18th century. The Victorian creation of baking powder by English food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843 allowed the addition of butter to the traditional sponge recipe, resulting in the creation of the Victoria sponge. Cakes are available in many flavours and have many recipes as well. Sponge cakes have become snack cakes via the Twinkie.
Arany Galushka is a traditional Hungarian dessert consisting of balls of yeast dough (galuska). The balls are rolled in melted butter, and then rolled in a mixture of sugar and crushed nuts, assembled into layers, before being baked till golden. Arany means gold or golden; galuska refers to the dumpling nature of the balls of dough. Aranygaluska may be served with vanilla custard.
Allerheiligenstriezel or simply Strietzel is a braided yeast pastry. Its name means "All Saints' braid" in English and it consists of flour, eggs, yeast, shortening or butter, raisins, milk, salt, and decorating sugar or poppy seeds. Some regional variations also include rum or lemon juice.
Palatschinke is a thin crêpe-like variety of pancake of Greco-Roman origin. The dessert is common in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe.
Pie in American cuisine has roots in English cuisine and has evolved over centuries to adapt to American cultural tastes and ingredients. The creation of flaky pie crust shortened with lard is credited to American innovation.
