Russian cakes - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

A socio-cultural perspective on Russia’s cake habit contrasted and compared with and illuminated by one or two supplementary notes about having your cake and eating it in Great Britain

Revised 4 February 2025 | First published 26 March 2023 ~ Russia’s Love of Cakes Differs from the UK’s

Cakes. I don’t imagine for one moment that when somebody in the West mentions Russia, cakes are the first thing that spring to mind. Equally, I’m willing to wager that the UK media has written precious little lately, or written little at all, about the magnificent variety of cakes in Russia and the widespread availability of them in spite of those silly old sanctions.

They certainly would never divulge that the super-abundance of cakes in Russia is part of a western plot organised and funded by the Sorryarse Open Cake Society to swamp the Federation with cakes, similar to the way in which it is suffocating the western world with boat loads of useless migrants. I am not so sure about cake, but the spotted dick that they are creating is fast filling up with gritty currants.

Whoa now! Hang on a minute! Blin, yolkee polkee and blaha mooha! How dare you lump our delicious Russian cakes in the same inflatable dinghy with a gaggle of grinning third-world freeloaders destined for 5-star hotels at the expense of the British taxpayer!

Sorry, I stand corrected and in the same breath exposed. It is true that I am no Don Juan when it comes to loving cakes. However, as one of the last of the few true Englishmen, I concede to enjoying a nice slice of cake whenever the mood so takes me and, when the opportunity avails itself, regard it to be the perfect accompaniment to the English custom of afternoon tea.

Alice in Wonderland, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

All well and good, but neither affrontery apologised for nor my confessed willingness to embrace the odd iced cake rather than the swarthy migrant amounts to diddly-squat when it comes to explaining the cultural differences that set cake worship apart in Russia from similar proclivities in the UK.

Cakes are cancel proof

Cancel-proof, like most things pertaining to Russian culture, as the West is finding out and finding out the hard way, Russia’s love of cakes is in a sacrosanct league of its own. For example, it is not often, if indeed at all, that you will see men in the UK roaming around the streets with a big sticky cake in their hands. There is every possibility that you will see them holding another man’s hand, or, if you are really unlucky ~ or lucky if you are a professional photographer assigned to defining British culture ~ some other part of their brethren’s anatomy, but never a cake in hand. In the UK there seems to be an hypocritical subtext, an unspoken reservation at work, which, ironically, seems to imply that even in these enlightened times cakes and men together in public is tantamount to poofterism. Alack a day, but there you have it.

Russia’s love of cakes differs from the UK’s

Having thus established that men carting cakes around in public is not the done thing in Britland (but then what is and, more to the point, who is?), we arrive at a striking contrast. I’ve lost count of the number of times when entertaining at home (dispel all images of magic tricks, juggling, charades and karaoke) that on opening the gate to greet our Russian guests, at least one man will be standing there with a large stodgy cake in his grasp. As for dining out, I have yet to go to a restaurant with my Russian friends where rounding off a meal without a sumptuous sweet, most of which resemble cakes drenched in cream and syrup, would turn an everyday event into something of a precedent. Perchance it ever occurs, it would breach the unexpected like a hypersonic missile bursting through the dream of eternal hegemony. Cakes don’t come in on a wing and a prayer in Russia; they are part of the national psyche, in which whim and caprice can play no part.

The company Cakes R Rus is yet to be incorporated. The reason for this oversight is not immediately clear when cakes in Russia attract such popularity, but the greater mystery by far must be why in Russia are cakes so popular? It is a matter for conjecture, is it not, that often what presents itself at best as a half-baked explanation turns out in the long run to be remarkably overdone. Not so when it comes to cakes. Cakes are interwoven into every Fair Isled fabric of daily, popular and expressive life. Judge this on the merit that there are almost as many traditional sayings, remarks and literary allusions to cakes, and on matters pertaining to cakes, as there are cakes themselves. We will come to that in a moment.

Speaking from experience, all shops in Kaliningrad, that is to say all food shops, except the fishmongers, the butchers and the caviar sellers (add your own to contradict me), however small the shop may be, are guaranteed to stock one, two, even sometimes three, fairly chunky, big, round cakes, whilst supermarkets routinely offer flotilla to armada volumes of seductively sumptuous cake varieties, rich, lavish, opulent and sufficient in taste, size and price to float everyone’s cake-craving boat.

For the love of cakes

In addition to these generic outlets, Kaliningrad is no stranger to the small independent boaterie, sorry I meant to say bakery. There are any number of such bakeries (I won’t tell you just how many, for if I did that would be telling.), but the most noticeable because most prolific chain is undoubtedly Königsbäcker. Why not Kalininbacker? What a silly question.

Königsbäcker purveys pastries, pizza, bakes and cakes, and many of its cakeries ~ sorry I meant to say bakeries ~ also have on their walls not-for-sale super-large black and white Königsberg prints blown up from original photos of the ancient German city, showing it as it used to be before the British and Soviets blew it up ~ cake shops and everything else. These images are so poignant that they are enough to make you want to buy double the amount of cakes you would have bought had you not seen these pictures, purely for the placebo effect for which the comfort of eating cakes is renowned.

Prints of Konigsberg in Konisgbacher pastry shop. Kaliningrad

Now we have both stopped crying, I will try to explain how the Russian perception of cakes differs to the perceived role that cakes play in modern British society and why; and in the course of doing so, you may suspect that you have stumbled upon a hint that enables you to answer the question, why in Russia are cakes so popular?

Exactly how the Russian cake mentality diverges from its English counterpart is not as subtle as you might first think. So, for all you cake lovers out there, let me try to explain. Here goes!

First and foremost, bugger The Great British Bake Off, an awful television prog which is opium for the masses. Like coronavirus, which also kept people at home glued to their televisions, The Great British F!*off most likely foreshadows something more dreadful to come, such as The Great British Bake Off in the Nude and I’m A Cake Get me Out of Here, currently previewing on the Secretly Ashamed Channel.

The Great British Bake Off, which I always find time to switch off, lost all credibility for me when one of the female contestants was allegedly discovered substituting Viagra for self-raising flour. When the cake flopped, she was most disappointed. Aren’t we all when our cakes don’t rise. But her story had a happy ending, three to be precise, for when the show was over, after tea and cake with three of the show’s male competitors, she left the studio a satisfied woman. So satisfied, in fact, that she continues to pay her TV licence even to this day!

Anyway, Great Bake Offs or preferably no Great Bake Offs, my experience has it that the celebritising of cakes has very little impact on consumer purchasing habits. UKers may gasp in unison when confronted on the goggle box by Big Cake El Supremo, but it’s a different story altogether when buying down Asda or Iceland. Small synthetic packet cakes are the type that Brits on average go for, something cheap and abundant, over-stuffed with sugar and small enough to fit inside one’s pocket. (Hey you, watch out! There’s a store detective about! “And what of it! They can’t do nothin’. It would be a violation of our subhuman rights. Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! He! He!”)

**Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake baker’s man bake me a cake as fast as you can** (The cherished belief that all bakers are highly motivated individuals lends itself to scrutiny)

It occurs to me (which is the get out clause to ‘it occurs to nobody else and why would it?’), that cakes in Russia are rather more special-occasion items than tear open a packet of Kipling’s as quickly as you like and let that be an end to it!

Kipling’s individual pies are probably not as bad as so-called experts on synthetics would like us to believe, although when shady and disreputable store owners infringe the sell-by date, and this happens with greater frequency than it should in the UK, especially in shops run by migrants, the pastry tends to be dry and falls in embarrassing flaky bits down the front of your jumper. In winter, when it may, or conversely may not, be snowing, such socially unacceptable things may pass by virtually unnoticed, but once the Christmas jumper emerges in all its dubious glory into the glaring spotlight of spring, the shards of pastry in which you are covered can begin to look like dandruff. Mr Kipling may very well make exceedingly crumbly cakes, but to stop yourself from being conned and from looking more like a bit of a prick in your unfortunate Christmas jumper, particularly when it is splattered with pastry, choose your cake stores carefully and always check the sell-by-dates, especially if you have no option ~ and options in the UK are getting fewer by the boat load ~ than to buy from P. Akis Convenience Shores, a disproportionate number of which are concentrated in Dover. I wonder why that is?

Cake places revisited
🍰Telegraph Art Café, Svetlogorsk
🍰 Patisson Markt Restaurant, Kaliningrad
🍰 By Volga to Yantarny: Russian Easter and Beautiful Coast
🍰 Balt Restaurant, Zelenogradsk
🍰 Soul Garden, Kaliningrad
🍰 Mama Mia, Kaliningrad
🍰Croissant Café, Kaliningrad
🍰Telegraph Restaurant, Zelenogradsk
🍰Café Seagull by the Lake, Kaliningrad

Inspired by my last comment, I am tempted to ask, do you remember the 1970s’ individual fruit pie phenomenon, characterised first by square pies wrapped in grease-proof paper and later round pies presented on a tin-foil base? Tasty, ay! But, alas, like most things in life, they tended to shrink as time went by. Any road, can apple pies truly be classed as cakes? I suppose they can if you drop the word ‘pie’ and substitute it for ‘cake’, and am I stalling because I have bitten off more than I can chew in my self-appointed role as Anglo-Russian cakeologist?

Russia’s love of cakes is holistic

As I have already said (I hope you’ve been paying attention!), cakes in Russia are rather more a special-occasion commodity than tear open a packet of Kipling’s as quickly as you like and get them down you in one mouthful before the pastry crumbles. Kipling’s individual apple … (ah, we’ve already covered that …).

Moving on: I am not suggesting that they, Russian cakes, are strictly reserved for special occasions such as births, weddings and funerals, but they often come bearing people, such as to get-togethers at home, to private parties, social gatherings and events of a similar nature. They also occupy pride of place among boxes of chocolates and flowers as a way of saying thank you to someone who has rendered a kindness to another mortal soul or has performed some function in their official capacity above and beyond the call of duty.

In these contexts, the cake’s presentation shares equal importance with noshability, which possibly explains why Russian cakes, with their white-iced coverings, frothy cream crowns, candy sequins and fruit-festooned exteriors, make our traditional English jam and cream sponges look like poor relations; same bourgeoise boat perhaps but not at all on the upper-deck with their ostentatious Russian counterparts. Sigh, how ironically times can change and ostentatiously do, and with them cakes as well!

But let’s not leave it here! Whilst we, the English cannot compete with glitz, there is still a lot to be said for our good old-fashioned sponge cake, something that wants to make you sing not ‘There will always be an England’, because it’s much too late for that, but ‘There will always be a sponge cake’. There is something solid, enduring, traditional, something reassuringly staid and respectfully no-nonsense about plain, old English sponge cakes; something wonderfully neo-imperial, boldly neo-colonial, something so 1940s in the sense of stiff-upper lip that frankly I am astonished that these thoroughly English cakes have not been singled out for special ethnic-cleansing treatment by ‘take a knee’ cancel-culturists, or cast like so many heritage statues over walls and into ponds with the blessing of the left-wing British judiciary. Tell me, is it premature of me to feel even a little bit mildly complacent about the safety and sovereignty of the patriotic British cake? I’ll take a Tommy Robinson, please, he makes an exceedingly difficult rock cake for the soft under-dentures of the British establishment.

A socio-cultural perspective on cakes

The socio-cultural and historic significance of cakes may strike you as more than a mouthful, but history is replete with examples where the icing on the cake is the role of the cake itself. Spectacles such as birds flying out of giant cakes have been going on since the time of ancient Rome (not now, of course, due to animal rights laws) and scantily clad frosted women have been leaping out of oversized cakes since the 19^th century (not so much today, however, because of the feminist movement). I am perfectly aware of the existence of the Cambridge Stool Chart, but tell me, is the feminist ‘movement’ in some way linked to this chart?

**And you thought they were just coming in by dinghies!!**

Literary cake tropes have fared much better than their visual counterparts. Boris Johnson (You remember him, don’t you?), who had a cake named after him and in Kyiv no less ~ where else?, borrowed and modified the well-known phrase, ‘Have our cake and eat it’ in his bid to convince democracy of the benefits of Brexit. What he forgot to tell us, however, was that behind the political scenes the British and French governments had cooked up a migrant shuttle service ~ one-way ticket only ~ thus ensuring that after Brexit the cake would be ‘had’ alright, had and eaten by others, nibbled away like vermin at cheese, leaving nothing but crumbs for the British.

Slightly more famous than Boris Johnson but not, as far as I am aware, cake enriched by name, is Mary Antionette. She is credited with uttering the oft quoted and immortal phrase, ‘Let them eat cake!’, and although in all probability she said nothing of the sort, her disregard for, or indifference to, the plight of her country’s poor (typical of the French) is nowhere near as offensive as the Conservative party’s debasing betrayal of Britain’s Brexit electorate.

Boris ‘The Fruit Cake’ Johnson, sometimes referred to as ‘that Big Cream Puff’, is not the only man in showbusiness to have had an honorary cake named after him. Other cake-named celebs include no less than Elvis Presley, as well as such Russian personalities as ballet dancer Anna Pavlova and the first human to leave our world by rocket, Mr Yuri Gagarin, both of whom the West zealously tried to cancel just because their cakes were better than Boris’s, an all-show but nothing-of-substance confection cynically whipped up in Kyiv in order to keep the ackers flowing. Boris’s cake was made according to Biden’s recipe (that’s Biden as in empty chef’s hat not as in Master Baker). My question is, therefore, that with all this cake naming going on, isn’t it about time that somebody in Russia baked a cake and named it ‘Kobzon’ in memoriam of my favourite crooner? Come on chaps! How about it!

Whist I wait for this honour to be bestowed, we will hold our collective breath in anticipation of Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Adolf Hitler, oh and don’t forget our Tony ~ Tony ‘Iraq’ Blair ~ having cakes named after their illustrious personages. And what about a ‘Boat People’ cake to celebrate the end of Western civilisation.

And what is so wrong about that? A good many famous people and not so famous events and places have had the honour of cakes named after them. The most obvious being Mrs Sponge, who lent her name to the sponge cake. No kiddin’! No, its a historical fact! Her first name was Victoria. She lived the better part of her life at 65 Coronation Crescent. (Source: Alfred ‘Dicky’ Bird). Crossword Clue: 7 across ‘Queen’; 5 down ‘custard’.

Another famous namesake cake is Battenberg, relating to Prince Cake, and in the towns and locale category, that is to say where places not people have given their names to cakes, we have the English Eccles cake, which obviously gets its name from Scunthorpe, and a cake we all love to bypass, colloquially known as Sad Cake, named as legend has it after the UK town of Wellingborough. It’s a ‘going there thing’: so don’t!

The metropolis has its own cake, historically known as the White Iced Empire but renamed in recent years, if not entirely rewritten, and consequently referred to by those who would rather it remained as it was as Double Chocolate Black Forest Ghetto. Also known as Chocolate Woke or, by those who have not had their brainwashed heads thrust right up their arses (This is the BBC!) as the Liberal Upside Down cake. It is often confused with the Fruit-Bottom cake which, though far from all it is cracked up to be, sells like proverbial hot cracks during Londonistan’s Gay Pride month. If you have the extreme good fortune to be in the UK capital during that poof-pastry period, do make sure to skip lickety-split down to London’s Soho, the geographical and moral-less centre of LGBT fame, and treat yourself whilst you are there to a slice of the famous Navy Cake from Hello Sailor’s bun shop or a ‘once tried never forgotten’ Golden Rivet Muffin from the café El Bandido’s.

All of this, I am pleased to say, is a very long way away from Kaliningrad and its culture, and everybody who lives in Kaliningrad is also pleased to say, may it, with the Good Lord’s help, long remain that way.

Meanwhile, whilst you sit there wondering which of the world’s biggest cakes ought to be named after you, if there is anything in this treatise on Russian/British cakes which you think I haven’t covered, if you really feel that you must, then jot down the one or two points you believe I might have missed and consign your trunk full of comments to ‘Care of the Cake in MacArthur Park’ . It’s only right and proper since ‘It took so long to bake it …’

Please note: At the time of writing, Starmer hasn’t had a cake named after him yet, but according to one political commentator, a man who narrowly escaped debasing himself by appearing on the Great Bake Off, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous, when that great cake day eventually dawns Starmer’s cake is bound to be called something resembling CurranT, with the capital ‘T’ standing for ‘Taxes’ and some of the letters in between omitted. That one’s got me really foxed?

Image attributions

Mad Hatter’s Tea Party: https://picryl.com/media/alice-in-wonderland-by-arthur-rackham-08-a-mad-tea-party-c65b66

Vintage sponge cake: I found this image at <a href=”https://freevintageillustrations.com/vintage-sponge-cake-illustration/?utm_source=freevintageillustrations&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=downloadbox”>Free Vintage Illustrations</a> / https://freevintageillustrations.com/vintage-sponge-cake-illustration/

Girl jumping out of a cake: Image by <a href=” https://www.vectorportal.com” >Vectorportal.com</a>, <a class=”external text” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/” >CC BY</a> / https://vectorportal.com/download-vector/woman-jumping-out-of-a-cake-clip-art/22430

Nursery Rhyme Baker’s Man: I found this image at <a href=”https://freevintageillustrations.com/pat-a-cake-nursery-rhyme-illustration/?utm_source=freevintageillustrations&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=downloadbox”>Free Vintage Illustrations</a> / https://freevintageillustrations.com/pat-a-cake-nursery-rhyme-illustration/