A Cake is a flour-based confection made from flour, sugar, and other ingredients typically with leavening agents that is usually baked. In their oldest forms, cakes were modifications of bread (using yeast as a leavening agent), 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.

The most common ingredients include flour, sugar, eggs, fat (such as butter, oil, or margarine), a liquid, and a leavening agent, such as baking soda or baking powder. Common additional ingredients include dried, candied, or fresh fruit, nuts, cocoa, and extracts such as vanilla, with numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients. Cakes can also be filled with fruit preserves, nuts, or dessert sauces (like custard, jelly, cooked fruit, whipped cream, or syrups), iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders, or candied fruit. The English word 'cake' itself is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse word 'kaka'

The ancient Greeks called cake πλακοῦς (plakous), which was derived from the word for 'flat', πλακόεις (plakoeis). It was baked using flour mixed with eggs, milk, nuts, and honey. They also had a cake called 'satura', which was a flat, heavy cake. During the Roman period, the name for cake became 'placenta', which was derived from the Greek term. A placenta was baked on a pastry base or inside a pastry case. The Greeks also developed the use of brewing yeast for leavening cakes, a technique that was brought to Rome after the conquest of Greece.

In ancient Rome, the basic bread dough was sometimes enriched with butter, eggs, and honey, which produced a sweet and cake-like baked goods.

Early cakes in Medieval Europe 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. Though by the late middle ages, cakes would be flavoured with sweet spices and then with honey before being made richer with the inclusion of eggs and sugar.

Sponge cakes, leavened with the air trapped in beaten egg whites (or beaten eggs) were developed during the European Renaissance and were invented either in Spain or in Italy. Certainly, the technique seems to have come from Italy to England.

The first to create a form of baking powder (the foundation of modern cake baking) was English chemist and food manufacturer Alfred Bird in 1843. Bird was motivated to develop a yeast-free leavener because his wife Elizabeth was allergic to eggs and yeast. His formulation included bicarbonate of soda and tartaric acid, mixed with starch to absorb moisture and prevent the other ingredients from reacting. A single-action form of baking powder, Alfred Bird's Baking Powder reacted as soon as it became damp.