Eid Cakes are the Ultimate Dinner Present in Pakistan

Bakeries aren’t usually cause for chaos, but that changes on Eid. Saba Imtiaz looks at Pakistan’s tradition of gifting Eid cakes, what it signifies, and how that has changed over the years.

The end of Ramadan in Karachi, Pakistan marked by a protracted moon sighting, a burst of celebratory gunfire, and a last minute dash to the shops. But I don’t need to wait for a bunch of ageing clerics to peer into a telescope and bicker over the lunar cycle. My predictor is the inevitable traffic jam outside my building as soon as Eid is nigh.

This is the curse of living on the same street as three upscale bakeries, because Eid means buying cake, and Karachi’s residents can turn even something like cake into a form of organised chaos.

Cakes have become an inexplicable, unexplained, unquestioned part of the Eid-ul-Fitr festival in urban Pakistan. Every major bakery in Karachi, where I live, sells cakes on Eid. Some people don’t buy a single cake — they walk out with ten, even thirty cakes. There is no way to estimate how many cakes are sold over Eid, but it is safe to say it’s in the thousands. (Given the cacophony of car honks every Eid eve, at least half of them think they should double park on my street.) At United Bakery in Karachi’s Saddar area, the night before Eid is described as chaotic. “It’s an almost unmanageable situation” says Muhammad Kabir, 25, who has worked at United Bakery for over 10 years, describing Chand Raat sales. “Whoever gets ahead of the queue, thats who gets to buy something — there’s such a rush of people.” Extra staff is hired, and other branches are restocked during the next five days of cake sales. At the Pie in the Sky bakery, there are tables piled high with boxes of cake, with people racing in and out. Bakeries and banks partner to offer deep discounts for the holiday — which makes buying cakes a fairly irresistible bargain.

Everyone, it seems, is buying cake.

But who is eating it?

Given how many cakes are marketed, produced, bought, and distributed during the Eid holiday, the surprising part is that Eid cakes aren’t really meant to be consumed at home. They’re gifts. Eid cakes are given to friends, foes, colleagues, employees, associates; sent out by companies to clients ahead of the holiday, brought along by relatives and friends on interminable social calls. I am fairly convinced that Eid cakes exist in a permanent loop, just being sold and gifted and regifted over the three-day holiday. “Generally [people] buy cakes to share or to make a table look fancy or ceremonial,”says Mariam Akberali, the Chief Digital and Strategy Officer at the Hobnob chain of bakeries, who agrees that Eid cakes are mostly bought for gifting.

What Counts As Eid Cake?

 An ‘Eid cake’ sounds grandiose, but it is just a cake from the regular range of cakes at any bakery. An Eid cake is anything from a cheesecake or Lotus cake at an upscale bakery to the beloved, cream-laden Black Forest and pineapple cakes sold by mid-range bakeries. There is nothing uniquely Eid-like about the cake; no festival-specific flavour or decorations, save for customising the cake by having ‘Eid Mubarak’ written on it in icing.

 When I think about Eid food, cake doesn’t even factor into my imagination. To me, Eid is a time for traditional desserts like kheer and sawaiyyan, for spending the afternoon in a food coma and lazily scrolling through Instagram in a crumpled outfit, with a cup of tea that never quite manages to offset the impact of too many helpings of biryani, and to only have cake if one’s had too much kheer and opens the [gifted] cake box out of sheer curiosity.

Yet the hundreds of cakes sold over Eid tell a different story.

The Eid cake has been a part of urban, upper-class life in Pakistan since the country’s creation in 1947; most likely mirroring the idea of cakes made for festive holidays like Christmas. The archives of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper are full of ads for Eid cakes like one from “Ismail D. Adam Soomar & Co — City’s Oldest Bakers & Confectioners” — in June 1953, announcing “Idd Cakes” as well as advertising their specialty of sheermaal and naan for Eid day.

“Specially made for the occasion in

Various Beautiful Designs, Colours, Tastes and Novelties 

A Real Gift for Idd

To your friends & Relations”

Other bakeries and cafes would advertise Eid cakes too, like Cafe Grand, popular with Karachi’s elite in the post-Partition years, in 1979: it was happy to “play a part in your Eid celebrations.”

The Beginning of the Cake Tradition

For decades, cakes were not a significant part of urban everyday cuisine. Recipes for desserts like caramels were featured in women’s magazines like Akhbar Khawateen, which ran a recipe for a no-bake walnut cake in its February 27-March 5, 1971 issue, with the accompanying text: “The best quality of this dish is that it does not need to be baked, which is good news for our sisters who don’t have an oven at home.” Khush Zaiqa, a cookbook by Begum Bilquis Jehan Nasiruddin Khan, with heritage in the former princely state of Hyderabad Deccan, was published in 1970. The Urdu cookbook has pages and pages of dessert recipes for everything from firni to tandoori roti ka meetha — but not cake. Her English cookbook Mughal Cuisine, published in 1982, has a few recipes which involve the oven. A recipe for almond squares includes this note: “As my great grandmother was well known for her Badam kay Lawz ya Barfee, the Nizam once asked her to prepare some for an ‘Id dinner which he was having.”

A longstanding Eid tradition in middle-class Pakistan was to bring something sweet to another person’s house — usually mithai. Qasim Jafri, a general manager at the Avari Hotel in Lahore, said the trend of cakes really emerged a couple of decades ago. “Cake giving is now a part of our culture; before then, people would give sweetmeats,” Jafri said.

Cakes only really took off in the 1980s, with a proliferation of local bakeries, but these were still reserved for birthdays. Until the 1990s, the practice of buying and gifting cakes for Eid seem to have largely been restricted to upscale bakeries and five-star hotels. Buying a cake from a hotel was serious business — a sign that you had splashed out on the gesture. A Holiday Inn advertisement from the 1980s lists the festive Eid flavours at its in-house patisserie: “chocolate, coffee, lemon, mocca, orange, pistachio, strawberry, vanilla.”

There is no compelling, cutesy backstory to the Eid cake that I’ve come across in years of scouring newspaper archives in Pakistan. Instead, the Eid cake’s popularity came as consumerism and changing tastes intersected, and it became trendier and easier to buy cakes.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the mass-market Eid cake took off in Karachi, but gradually people began to add cakes to their last-minute Eid shopping routine. “Now is the time to order delicious Eid cakes,” the bakery Shezan proclaimed in an ad in Dawn a few days ahead of Eid-ul-Fitr in 1983. The Omar Khayyam Bakery, apparently introducing cakes for the first time that Eid, advertised “a variety of cakes to please your palate… The speciality we bake is a mouth-watering range of fresh cream cakes—black forest, pineapple,  lemon and many more… soft and fluffy with real fruit centres.” My friend, the writer Tooba Masood-Khan, recalls that her father used to buy at least a dozen cakes from the famed Bombay Bakery in the city of Hyderabad to distribute to friends and family on the first day of Eid, as they’d start making their rounds to relatives across Karachi.

When Pie in the Sky, an upmarket bakery opened in Karachi in 2001, they did fairly good sales their first Eid, their CEO Naila Naqvi recalls. “We still see a lot of people who prefer desi mithai,” she said. But perhaps the shift to cake, as Naqvi posits, has to do with a more ‘aware’ consumer. “For the past few years, there’s been this tremendous shift — there’s a change where people are more aware, more well-read, more well-travelled,” she said. Add in external influences, the internet, and an ensuing shift towards baking in urban Pakistan; and there are now scores of home bakers, patisseries, and cake studios, and a huge expansion of items available in local bakeries. Hobnob alone has a range of 250 products, including savoury items. United Bakery, which opened in Karachi in 1949, now sells everything from Black Forest cakes to more contemporary flavours like a Nutella-laden cake. For the past decade, home bakers and specialty bakers have introduced the city to over-the-top fondant cakes, and a whole range of flavours and desserts.

As cakes became used for more occasions than just birthdays, like anniversaries or religious occasions like Eid Milad un Nabi, the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad, cake has become the quintessential Eid gift.

Perhaps it’s the propensity for desserts in urban Pakistan, which means there is an audience inherently curious about baking and cakes — and is drawn online to self-taught bakers like the 22-year-old Hamza Gulzar Khan. Khan has nearly 58,000 followers on Instagram (@boybawarchi) and primarily makes French pastry — though he upended French Twitter the day he posted a photo of mango croissants. “I think a lot of people are really hesitant on working with bread dough — like yeasted dough, croissants, breads and, you know, things that required yeast in them because that's another element that you have to take care of,” Khan said. He was born in the United States, spent his childhood in Pakistan and has lived in the United States since 2014. “I think in general, people are really afraid of baking because they keep saying it's so hard, there's so much math and measurements involved, and this and that, with cooking, you can just put things together. It’s true, there are certain rules and regulations, but once you follow them, once you learn the foundation, there's so much you can do. But it's hard to sometimes grasp that. I guess it's a bit nerve wracking because if you make a mistake and the whole thing is messed up, it's hard to fix that.”

“The trend of eating cakes has only increased,” United Bakery’s Kabir said. He now works at a new branch of United Bakery, and is hoping for a successful Eid. “During the lockdown,” referring to the closures after the Covid-19 outbreak — “people ate cake. I can’t tell you why, but the trend didn't let up.” And not everyone is just gifting away cakes. Food blogger Aamna Khan has an enviable family tradition: “We get the death by chocolate cake from Nando’s — the whole thing — to have with family and all those who visit.” (The Nando’s cake is a legendary chocolate cake, sold by the slice in the restaurant and available to order as a whole cake as well.) In more upmarket areas of Karachi, Eid isn’t the only ritual where traditional mithai is being replaced. There are wedding cakes at Muslim nuptials now, and birth and wedding announcements are often accompanied by boxes of baklava or customised baked goods instead of mithai.

The Sweet Chaos of Finding The Perfect Eid Cake

Hobnob’s Akberali says they begin planning for Eid — a “huge holiday” for the bakery chain — three months in advance. “We get a lot of traffic on Eid,” she says. Despite a glut of bakeries, hotels are still making and selling cakes. “People have a little more confidence of five-star hotels that have a more structured system, hygiene controls, quality-based checks and balances,”Jafri said.

At United Bakery, the most popular Eid cake varies depending on the season. In the winter, the dry fruit cakes are more popular, when Eid is in the summer, it's the cream and chocolate cakes. These days the malt cake is very popular, but the most well-known cake is the pineapple cream cake. “It’s an old flavour, everyone, adults, young people — even if someone doesn't know the name of any cake, they’ll know the pineapple cake. It’s the most inexpensive cake,” United Bakery’s Kabir said. At Hobnob, the three milk cake is a big seller, as is their classic fudge cake.

Even though this year Eid comes amid inflation and political instability, bakery owners and managers don’t seem considerably worried about the impact on sales — perhaps people who can afford cake can continue to buy it despite this, or the lure of discounts will keep people queuing.

But for all the popularity of cake, desserts like kheer and sawaiyyan will still be made at home, and the tradition of distributing mithai isn’t lost at all. At United Bakery in the Saddar area, mithai probably still outsells cake, Kabir said. Even Khan/@boybawarchi, who is broadening to South Asian cooking content, will be making sawaiyyan for Eid, using his mother’s variation on the classic vermicelli dessert. During the first Eid of the pandemic, even I — a person who does not like to cook — made kheer from scratch, asking my aunt for advice on WhatsApp as I loomed over the stove in a hot kitchen. It is hard to escape the lure of tradition, of culinary customs, whether it is stirring a pot of kheer or queuing up for cake.

I can’t find any answers for just why Eid cake is so popular. But perhaps I have this all wrong: after all, what does an Eid cake signify? Is it an expensive, burdensome social custom to bring something along when visiting someone — whether out of love or being dragged there by one’s parents — or is it truly borne out of joy? Perhaps after a month of patience and fasting, the idea of finally meeting people, of sharing in a time of festivity, particularly after two wrenchingly hard years of social distancing and death in the air, means you must bring something sweet along. After all, Eid-ul-Fitr, as Kabir reminds me, is also called meethi Eid — and perhaps that’s why, as stuffed as I am on Eid day, I will inevitably crack open the cake box and see what the visitors brought along.

Saba Imtiaz writes about culture, food, and urban life. She is the author of the novel Karachi, You’re Killing Me! and co-host of the Notes on a Scandal podcast.

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