<P> Early cakes in England were also essentially bread: the most obvious differences between a "cake" and "bread" were the round, flat shape of the cakes, and the cooking method, which turned cakes over once while cooking, while bread was left upright throughout the baking process . </P> <P> Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain . </P> <P> 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 . One company patented a cake - bread mix in order to deal with this economic situation, and thereby established the first line of cake in a box . In so doing, cake as it is known today became a mass - produced good rather than a home - or bakery - made specialty . </P> <P> 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 the cake in a box rendered the cake - making function of housewives relatively dispiriting . This was a time when women, retired from the war - time labor force, and in a critical ideological period in American history, were confined to the domestic sphere and oriented towards the freshly blossoming consumerism in the US . In order to compensate for this situation, the marketing psychologist Ernest Dichter ushered in the solution to the cake mix problem: frosting . 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 . </P>

When did the first cake mix come out