Padraic Colum at Commonweal:
I have never lost my taste for cakes. After the cakes of folk-culture such as pancakes and “the cake of the palm,” came cakes that were still popular but approaching the cakes of the higher cultivation: squares of ginger-bread sold off carts at little fairs or in little shops; ginger-cakes which were very vitalizing as one faced a mile of road on a chill evening (in those remote days one could get a bag-full for two pence). Later on there was a heavy, clammy cake that one bought in pennyworths—Chester Cake it was called. It was related that the ingredients of this cake were always mixed in beer—porter—and this rumor added to the worth of the cake, to our minds, by giving it a dark and secret origin. And, still on the border between the cakes of folk-culture and the cakes of the higher cultivation, there were spiced cakes and cream tarts.
Then came cakes of the higher cultivation—cakes with icings, cakes with rare fruits crowning them and embedded in them, cakes that are the creations of meditative and daring intelligence. All such cakes are a temptation to me—all, I should say, except cakes that have chocolate outside or inside of them. I think such cakes are mistaken.
more here.