It’s kind of funny to go back and see just how much they’ve changed in a hundred years when we probably never gave their evolution a single thought.

Still, when you see the craziness of a 2016 cake, you’ll realize how far we’ve come.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Pretty much just a plain (but pretty) white-looking cake with some flowers laid upon it.

Things are starting to get a little taller with a pedestal, a second tier, and a chalice atop the cake.

This seems to blend the two previous decades.

Tall cake, but consisting of plain tiers. Also note the figurines appear for the first time.

We get columns and a little more detail around the edges of the cake.

Icing flowers make their first appearance, and the level of detail increases.

As you can see, height comes via two sets of columns and at the expense of…cake.

Sweet, sweet cake sacrificed for aesthetics.

Terrible.