If you were a child that grew up during the 1980s in Australia and had a parent who showed even the loosest interest in baking, you are no stranger to the Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. As the Facebook group says, it's awesome.  If you’re not aware of the book, it is a magazine-sized, lovingly photographed set of instructions to carve cakes into festive shapes and whose sole gift to cake decorating is that it unleashes the decorative potential of licorice bullets and butter cream icing. The cakes are pure pound cake kitsch from an era when kids would demand a cake not based upon Pixar intellectual property.

I was a little scandalised when I read back over the recipes to find that the book recommended buying a packet cake mix to make the cake that you’d shape into the form of an evil duck. There is a recipe in the front section for a basic butter cake, but each individual cake recipe specifies using an industrial alternative. I had always taken cooking cakes from scratch as a given because the ingredients are always on hand.

The idea of 'cooking from scratch' is recent because until the 1940s, starting from a base set of relatively unprocessed ingredients was the only option. The diligent home cook was not exactly milling their own flour but there was almost no option to begin baking using a prepackaged good. Cake was the same as it had been for hundreds of years: liquid, eggs, flour, sugar and fat in various proportions. The classic pound cake is a quarter each of eggs, flour, sugar and butter; where a sponge cake is roughly half eggs. The method for making cake was either to aerate the fat and the sugar for butter cakes or aerate the eggs and sugar for anything that is loosely like a sponge.

From around 1910, these proportions and methods of making cake changed radically due to two innovations. Firstly, the development of hydrogenated vegetable oils made the aeration of cakes easier (and were 12 per cent of the price of the butter they substituted). This development alone reduced the onerous task of beating a cake batter by hand.

Secondly, the development of low-protein 'cake flour' allowed manufacturers to develop packaged mixes which could stay light and moist while the amount of sugar in them could rise well above the amount of flour. Cakes became easier, cheaper, sweeter and packaged. Instead of any specialised method of aerating the batter, all the ingredients could be poured into a bowl and mixed in a single hit. It removed any skill from baking a cake, and while the result tastes like a packaged cake, it otherwise appears like a perfect cake every single time. Once the packaged cake became popular in the 1940s, the idea of cooking from scratch crept into the vernacular.